ALGIERS - VILNIUS - ALGIERS: A STUDY IN MINOR LITERATURE
Julija hkys
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
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Algiers - Vilnius - Algiers: A Shidy in Minor Literature
'JY
Julija Sukys
Doctor of Philosophy 2001
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto
The works of Ngerian author Assia Djebar and Litvak writçr Icchokas Meras lie at the centre of this study. In it 1 consider the texts of Djebar and Meras as rexts (if minor literature, using Gilles Dcleuzc and Félix Guattari's KaFka: Toward a Minor Literaturc: as my starting point. Both Djebar and Meras write in the languagc: of the other, and 1 argue that it is their simultaneous being inside and outside of language (and comrnunity) that defines thern as writers of minor literature. These writers deform and disrupt language, rnaking it stutter and infusing it with new meaning. While stuttering language is one result of the ever-present tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization that is a t the heart of minor titerature, i have tried to show that this process happens not only in language (as in Djebar), but in the narratives that communities tell about themselvcs (as in Meras) as well. The collectivity of minor literature - the fact that minor Iiterature is always writien by rnany hands - has led me to a reading of its texts as rhizomes and as assemblages. This rhizomorphous reading is a reading across texts and genres. It is a reading process that dows .- 11 for multiform texts, as rhizomes are always multiple and continually becorning. In addition to the adoption of language, another common thread ties the texts of this study together: the memory of war, violence, and loss. It is the simultaneous struggle to honour the memory of disappeared loved ones, and to free oneself from the past in ordec to let old wounds heal that links not only Djebar and Meras, but which opens their texts out to a much larger assemblage, or collection of rhizomes. It is this contradictory impulse - to hang on while letting go (to reterritorialize while deterritorializing) - that is at the cenm of minor litcraiurc. The texts of minor Literature are written by many hands, and this one is no exception.
Countless people have left their mark on these pages along the way - sometimes knowingly and sometimes not - 1 will mention but a téw of them. First and foremost 1 must thank Linda
Hutcheon, who had the generosity of spirit and the imagination to take on what must have seemed a very odd project. A great deal of what 1 carry away hmthis text has been learned from her. It has been an honour and a pleasure to be her student. 1 thank Ted Chamberlin for his well-timed kind words and insight over the years, as well as Roland
Le Huenen who has been invaluable to me 50th intellectually and in his role as the director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, which under his leadership has become an increasingly supportive space for students. 1 thank Violeta Kelertas for her generosity in taking on the role of the Lithuanian eyes and ears on my cornmittee long-distance trom
Chicago.
This project took me into archives, and 1 was futtunate enough to spend a rnonih in
Vilnius to do research. The funding that 1 received from the AukStaitê Grant (Centre for
Iiussian and East European Studies), the Witness-as-Study Project (Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education), and the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto made
that trip possible. On site in Vilnius, Giedrius Viliünas of the Department of Lithuanian
Philology at Vilnius University helped me track dom Meras's papers at Lithuania's
Literature and Art Archive, where the fiiendly archivist greeted me like a long-lost niece
iv everyday. 1 thank both Giedrius and the archivist whose name I no longer remember for making me feel welcome. My Ontario Graduate Scholarship made it possible to finish my work upon my return Toronto, where 1 have found many teachers among my friends and family. 1 thank my dear friend Mark Clamen who has always been generous with his knowledge of the Vilna ghetto among other ihings, George Gasyna for sharing with me his linguistic expertise, Rebecca Comay who has fed my thinking on archives and memory, and my grandmother Veronika Kubilius to whom f turned when al1 dictionaries had failed me.
Finally, 1 thank my colleague, friend and partncr Sean Gurd who acccimpanied me îïrst to
Vilnius and then throughout the writing process. His fresh eyes and sharp wit have allowed me to see things 1 wouldn't have seen othenvise. Entirc scctions of this text (the best parts of itt 1 think) owe their existence to conversaiions Sean and 1 had over meals, and to off-hand remarks he shouted up the stairs €rom his desk in the basement. 1 dedicate this work to my father, Algirdas Sukys, who loved books and language. A Note on Sources and Translations
1 have used published translations of my primary texts wherever possible. !f a published translation is cited, a source reierence will follow both the original citatim and its translation. If a single nkrence iollows both the original and translation (as per MLA guidelines), ihe translation is mine, and the page number refers to the original source. The
Appendix includes a selection of Simaitk's hand-writtcn letters whicfi 1 have transcribcd and translated. In some places where words are illegiblc 1 have simply signalled this with the phrase '[illegible word].' In other places 1 have hazarded a guess as to what the word çould be, and have signalled this by putting the word in square brackcts, followed by a question mark: '[example?].' 1 have tried CO reproduce the original texts as accurately as possible, and sometimes - in the case of Awia Djebar's sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation, and in the case of archival sources - this has rneant reproducing passages that contravene standard
typographical practices (especially in the case of ellipses, where three periods are used by
Djebar, Ona Simaite and Salorneja Néris, rather than the standard Cour). It seems to me that in
a text very much concerned with errors and misspellings, sornc renegade punctuation is
somehow appropriate. Table of Contents ... List of Appendices...... vw-ix . . Introduction: Vilnius .Algiers .Vilnius ...... 1
1 . Violence of Language / Language of Violence ...... *...... 9
II. Detemtocialization: The Rhizome and the Archive ...... *...... 66 ... III . Moonweek . Mouvance. and Multiplicity ...... 118
IV . Strasbourg: Erotic Nights at the Junction ...... 158
Conclusion: Nnius - Vilgiers - Alnius...... 195
Appendices ...... 197
Works Consulted...... 260 List of Appendices
1. From Yitzhak Arad's Ghetto in Flames.
2. From Herman Kruk's The End of Jerusalem of Lithuania (Chronicles 1939-441.
3. From Yitschok Rudashevski's Diarv of the Vilna Ghetto.
4. From Macha Rolnikas's Je devais Ie raconter.
5. From Shoshana Kalish's introduction to ihe song "Tsvev Taybelekh" 'Two Doves' in Yes.
We Sang.
6. Ona Simaite's letter tri Kazys Jakubénas, 21 October 1941.
7. Simaite's lctter to Jakubénas, 7 March 1942.
8. Simaite's Ictter to Jakubenas, 12 April 1942.
9. Simaite's letter to Jakubénas, 26 May 1942.
10. Simaite's letter to Jakubenas, 8 November 1942.
11. Simaite's letter to Jakubenas, 7 March 1943.
12. Simaité's Ietter to Jakubenas, 28 March 1943.
13. Simaite's letter to Jakubenas, 10 September 1943.
14. Simaite's lctter to Marijona Cilvinaite, 2 October 1957.
15. Simaite's ktter to Cilvinaité, 17 December 1957.
16. Detail from Simaite's letter to tilvinaité, 17 Deçember 1957.
17. Simaite's letter to Cilvinaite, 18 May 1958.
18a. IS J. Baranausko parodymq (From I. Baranauskas's testimony).
18b. IS J. Baranausko parodymq (From J. Baranauskas's testimony).
**. VI11 19.14 J. Barkausko parodymy (From J. Barkauskas's testimony).
20. IS A. Galdikausko parodymy (From A. Galdikauskas's testimony).
21. Naudiiüno parodymy (From Naudiiünas's restimony).
22. Rusi) ir lenicq getai (Russian and Polish ghettos).
23. 14 liudininkes A. Macienes parodymg (From the witncss A. Maciene's testimony).
24. From Reza Baraheni's What Haouened after the Weddine?. Introduction
Vilnius --Alglers - Vilnius
Vilnius is a Baroque city. However, the Baroque generally requires space, distance, perspective; cities were already laid out along modern lines in that epoch. The Vilnius Baroque is a Baroque against a rnedieval background.
The network of little streets is medieval: everything is crooked, crowded, entangled; above this labyrinth rise the mighty cupoias and towers of a totally different century. Nothing appears hcre in irs totûlity: parts of churches, slanting walls, silhouettes sliced in half loom around a corner [. . .]. The history and hurnan relations of this city are 1:qually entangled [. . .].(Venclova qtd. in Milosz's "Dialogue about Wiino with Tomas Venclova" 38-39)
As it happens, 1 went to Vilna -Vilnius, as it is now called [my emphasis] - [.
. .] and, 1 can testify, 1 miserably failed to conjure up even the stage-play illusion of anamnesis. To be sure, 1 found the Lithuanian capital striking, but its wonderful medieval and baroque churches had no imaginative resonance for me, having never figured in the old-world accounts of my grandparents or any of their friends. Did they even these churches, 1 wonder? That is, did they register them as anything but indiffetentiated symbols of Vilna - for
Vilna, long one of the centers of Talmudic leaming and Yiddish culture, was
almost forty percent Jewish in the early part of the twentieth century - it is
1 virtually gone, buildings, Libraries, culture, Ianguage destroyed along with the
people who were murdered by the Fascists and then erased, even as a memory,
by the Soviets. There were 129 synagogues in Vilna in 1939; there is one now.
(Greenblatt 55)
Stephen Greenblatt's claim aside, the city of Vilnius-Vilna-Wilno has always had threc names, and many more pasts: some of these pasts are sharneiul, and others proud. The city- scape that Tornas Venclova traces in the first citation above -one of tangled streets, slanting walls, and crooked roofs - is a testament to Vilnius's multiple heritage; whereas Greenblatt's citation that iollows is a testament to the distance that exists between the Litvak and
Lithuanian imaginings of this small, contested, and rnythologizcd city in which human relations have been entangled for centuries. In my writing of this text over the past twci years
1 have focussed on one of Vilna/Vilnius's more shametul moments: its years spent under
Nazi occupation, when there was a Jewish ghetto in the old town, and during which the vast rnajority of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered. The narrative about Vilnius that 1 had received as a child of the Lithuanian DP (displaced persons, i.e. refugees from the Soviet occupation) emigré cornmunity included nothing about the Vilna ghetto, or even about the presence of Jews in Lithuania. When 1 began to explore Jewish accounts of Vilna, 1 found a world that 1 hardly recognized, and ihat had nothing to do with the fantasy of the place 1 had constructed through the songs and siories of my childhood. Greenblatt, in returning to
Vilnius, clearly found a place that he hardly recognized from his family's stories. Vilnius and
Via(setting aside here the subject of Polish Wilno), it seemed to me, were as iar apart as
Toronto and Tokyo. Indeed, to use Venclova's words, nothing appeared in its totality in 3 either narrative, neither narrative toId of a place that was both Vilna and Vilnius. To consider them as one and the same place seemed an almost impossible, yet tempting and potentially revolutionary thing to do. 1 wanted to fmd a way of bridging these two mutually exclusive versions of LithuanialLita (as Lithuania is called in Yiddish) and Vilnius/Vilna. This is how I came across the Litvak writer Icchokas Meras: the starting point for what has become my study in minor literature.
Meras is one of the very lew survivors of a community that was almost completely annihilated during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation of Lithuania during which over ninety percent of the country's Jewish community perished. This writer, who lost his entire iarnily
'to the grave1 pit,' (ivvro duobei) survived because, for some reason, someone decided to iake pity on the children one day. Thus, Meras stands as a representative of a lost community and as a witness to events of the past, yet he offers his testirnony in a language that is noi that of his people.
Meras is a writer of minor literature. [n the most pared-down of delinitions, a writer of minor literature writes 'in' one (dominant) lanyuage, and 'out' of another (minority) language. In truth, minor literature is much more complex: it involves the bumping up of languages against each other, and it requires the writer to position and continually reposition him- or herself politically vis-à-vis the various communities he or she addresses. Writrrs of minor literature always write simultaneously in a language and against it: disrupting and disturbing it, breaking its syntax, infusing it with foreign words, sounds, and syllables, and subverting a community's accepted version of itself. This is the process of deterritorialization. The second haif of this snidy has taken me far away from Lithuania and the former
Soviet Union to francophone writing in Algeria, and to the texts of Assia Djebar. While
Meras's brand of minor literature interrogates and reshapes the past - through his texts wc can see how minor literature is continually becoming, and how it is a collective endeavour - language Lies at the centre of Djebar's minor writing. Djebar, an Arabo-Berber Algerian writer of French expression, deterritorializes language. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari outline their concept of detemtorialization in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and it is a concept that, in my view, is the derining feature of rninor liierature. Deterritorialization is what rcvolutionizes language: making it strange, and making it stutter. It is the tension between its opposing impulses to deterritorialize and reterritorialize (to normalize languagcs and narratives) chat fuels the writing of minor literaturc. Minor Iiterature is multiple. Rather than presenting a merely oppositional relationship between two languages - French vs.
Arabic in Algeria, or Lithuanian vs. Yiddish or Russian in Lithuania - minor literature is a layering of languages and communities, and is a site of their various inlerpenetrations. Minor literature does no& invent a multiplicity of languagcs by opposing one tongue against another, rather, it grows out of contexts that are already multiple, and have always been so: witness the triple naming of Vilnius-Vilna-Wilno, and hsia Djebar's portrayal of Algeria as a landscape of ever-shifting linguistic triangles. Both Djebar and Meras corne to their writing with multiple inheritances and multiple allegiances. Meras acquired his language of expression (Lithuanian) as a child when, having lost his family, he was taken in and raised by a Catholic Lithuanian in a village called Kelme/Kelm. In Djebar's case, the neavy inheritance is passed on in the fom of a gift from her father to her at age eleven, the gift of her stepmother-tongue. It is a multiple inheritance that is borh liberating and oppressive.
Language for both these authors is at once Me-giving and siained with blood.
With the texts of these two authors in mind, 1 started out on a joumey rhat, at first, seemed typically post-colonial: self vs. other, colonizer vs. colonized, fnend vs. foe.
Although this kind of dynamic is very much apparent in Djebar's novels that preccdcd the
1990s -L'amour. la fantasia (Fantasia. an Algerian- Calvacade), which tells of Ngeria's wars of colonization and decolonization, is one examplc of which this is truc - thc violcnt cvcnts of the 1990s changed Algeria dramatically, and thcy changed the way that Djebar, Kor one,
imagines the role of ianguage in her country. After the legislative eIections of 1992 wcrc stopped short after the victory of the FIS (Front islamicue du salut) Islamist party on the tïrst
baltot, Aigeria rapidly descended into conflict. Armed IsIamist groups formcd. and declared
war on the so-called Hizb-Fransa (Party of France): meaning francophone inteIlectuals, journalists, foreigners, and anyone else seen to be collaborating with thc regime and against
the Islamisi agenda. The period of the killing of intellectuals (many of whom were writers
and journalists of French expression) - a period now rcferred to as the intelIocide - ensucd.
Djebar found herself in Strasbourg writing a novel during this violent period: a novel which
was interrupted by the urgent need to write in response to the violent events in Algeria. Both
the interrupted text (Les nuits de Strasboure- [Strasbour~Niehtsl), and the interrupting texts
(v[So Vast the Prison], Le blanc de I'AI~érie[The White of Al~eriaI,and
Oran. langue morte [Oran. Dead taneua~e])are central to this study. Chapter One discusses
the three latter texts, which interrogate, if not make sense of, the self-destruction of the
author's homeland, and all try to re-imagine and re-map the linguistic landscape of Algeria, 6 in which the dichotomy of French to Arabic would give way to a multiplicity of tongues.
Just as the concepts of minor literature and detemtorialization allow for a new way of reading Djebar's texts, which no longer support a post-colonial reading after 1990, Deleuze and Guattari's image of the rhizome (A Thousand Plateaus) allows for the tracking of the various trajectories in and out of Meras's texts. The rhizome is multiple, it contains tlight lines and pathways, and it maps out a journey. This image of a tuber or burrow opens a door to a reading across texts, and out to a iarger, collective narrative of the Vilna ghetto, which 1 consider as an assemblage in Chapter Two. My reading of Uiosios trunka aicimirka
(Stalematc) in that chapter is informed by its connections to other texts and historical figures of the Vilna ghetto. Reading Meras's novel in juxtaposition with thc teenaged Yitschok
Rudashevski's Diar~of the Vilna Ghetto, and with the letters of Ona Simaite - the librarian of Vilnius University, who smuggled people out of the ghetto, hiding them in the university library's stacks that were under her supervision - allows for a reading of the Vilna ghetto as archive, and, in turn, of Meras's literary archivc as a minor literature. A reading of thc Vilna ghetto as rhizome illuminates minor literature's characteristic collectivity and continual becoming that are the defining features of Meras's literary production. Both his novels
Lv~iosiostrunka akimirh and Menulio savaitè (Moonweek), whose narratives take place inside and around the Vilna ghetto, have complex textual histories: each was published first under the Soviets and then again in post-Soviet Lithuania, and in both cases the two published versions differ. In addition to the two differing published versions, a third version of each of these texts (unpublished typescripts of both Lyeiosios and Mènulio savaitè housed in Lithuania's Literature and Art Archive) enter the discussion as weli. Chapter Three 7 examines the radical changes that have been made to Menulio savaite over the course of thirty years. It considers this short novel as a multiform text through a discussion olSoviet historiography (and censorship) of the Holocausi, and through a tracing of the manifestations of both interna1 and external censorship in Meras's texts. Finally that chapter examines
Meras's metafictional gesture of making censorship a part of the fabric of the novel through the invocation of Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels as intertext, and through the latter's fragmentation.
To become a writer of rninor literature, Deleuze and Guattari tell us in Katka, mcans becoming a nomad in one's own language. Chapter Four examines the possibility of turning from exile to nomad in Djetiar's interrupted novel Les nuits de Strasbourg. One important characteristic of rhizomes are flight lines which radiate out from multiple points. Such flight lines mut, at some point, rneet up once again. In Djebar's ncivel, Strasbourg is a junction for these flight lines and the exiles who travel along them, and as such it is a node. Nodes hold within them the possibility for transformation: and in Les nuits de Strasbourg this transformation is one from exile to nomad. Some of the novei's exiles are successtiil in completing this change of state; others are not.
In addition to the adoption of language, another common thread ties rhe texts of this study together: the memory of war, vioIence, and loss. It is the simultaneous struggle to
honour the memory of disappeared loved ones, and to free oneself from the past in order to
let old wounds heal that links not only Djebar and Meras, but which opens their texts out to a
much larger assemblage, or coilection of rhizomes. It is this contradictory impuIse - to hang
on while letting go (to reterritoriaiize while detemtorializing) - that is ai the centre of minor literature. Cbapter One
Violence of Language/ Language of Violence
As a young girl, Assia Djebar received the gift of her language of expression by accident, when, unplanned, her father - a teacher in a school for 'indigenous' (as the
Algerians were called by the French colons) boys - took his young daughter to school with hirn. The young girl stayed in school, and the language stuck. And so, as a result of a kind of accident of history, Djebar writes in the language of the enerny ("la langue adverse"). CIer narrators have dcscribed this relationship between the Arabo-Berber Ngerian wnter and the
French language in terms of the receipt of a poisonous gift; as that of a stepchild to a stepmother-tongue: and as a linguistic battle. The following chapter considers what it means to write in the language of the other. It traces Djebar's literary 'conversion' - her reconciliation with French as Ianguage of expression after many years of having taken an oppositional stance toward the French language, culture and literati - in the context of
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minoc literature and stuttering language.
Autobiography and Conversion
One thing that strikes the reader of Assia Djebar's (ever-growing) body of writing is the ten-year silence (1968 (01978) that occurred after the publication of her fourth novel Les alouettes naïves (The Naïve Larks). "When i'm asked to introduce myself to an audience that may not have read ali of my works," Djebar said in a 1990 interview,
1 use this little skit: '1 was born in Algeria. Between the ages of twenty and
thirty, 1 wrote four novels. 1 then stopped publishing for about ten years. For
9 10 two years, 1 worked c\n a film among the women of my tribe, deep into the
farniliar tenitory of my chfidhood. Aftewards, 1 came back tu writing. 1 had
just turned forty. It's at that point that 1 finally felt myself fully a writer of the
French language, while remaining deeply Aigerian. (Women of Aieiers 168)
This ten year 'silence' to which Djebar aUudes in the interview demarcates d radical shifi in the kind of text that she produces. tt marks a shift to a frankiy autobiographical writing and signais the beginning of a reconciliation with French as her language of expression. In the
1980s French bccomes a more and more welcoming space to Djebar -a maison d'acceuil- while in the '90s, in the face of the self-destruction of Algeria through terrifying vioknce and civil war, Ianguage becomes the author's sole tenitory as she is forced into exile, as she ieels her country slipping into ruin, and as the dreams of her gencration - a generation which came of age during the Algerian war of independence - cvaporate. The choice to return to the production of French texts after a decade olnon-writing changes the relationship between auihor and language from one of colonizer/colonized to something infinitely more complex and interesting. 1 would like to consider this shift, this dccade of silence, as a moment of conversion.
We first fmd the connection between conversion and autobiography in Augustine, much later in the Anabaptist tradition,' and more recently in racist conversion narratives.'
Djebar expiicitly draws a direct iine between herself and St. Augustine, 'the father of
See Payne's The Self and the Sacred.
See Hobson's But Now 1 See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative. 11 autobiography,' positing herself as continuing an Algerian tradition (begun by Augustine) of writing in the language of the other. Djebar repatriates Augustine to Algeria, grounding hls writing in North Africa and assigning him Berber ancestry:
J'ai senti que la langue de l'autobiographie, quand elle n'est pas la langue
maternelle, fait que presque inévitablement, même sans le vouloir,
l'autobiographie devient une fiction. Après tout, les premiers textes
autobiographiques sont de mon pays: Les Confessions de Saint Augustin.
C'est un Algérien, de Bône, de Annaba, qui icrit en latin alors que sa mère est
dans le punique qui existe encore après la déstruction de Carthage et
certainement aussi le libyque, c'est-à-dire le berbère [. . . 1. Quand j'ai
commencé à écrire en français, j'ai rencontré ces grandes figures, qui me
dépassent, mais qui me semblaient être dans une mtme situation de langue.
(Djebar, L'écrivain franco~hone23)
I felt that the language of autobiography, when not the mother-tongue, means
that, without even intending to do so, autobiography becomes fiction. After
all, the first autobiographical texts are from my country: St. Augustine's
Confessions. He's an Algerian from Bône, from Annaba who writes in Latin,
whereas his mother speaks a Phoenician that still exists after the destruction of
Carthage and certainly Lybian as weli - which is Berber [. . . ).When 1 began
to write in French, 1 met these great figures, who surpassed me, but who
seemed to me to be in a similar linguistic situation. 12 In grounding Augustine in Algeria, Djebar paves the way for her own conversion. In her writing of the post-conversion period, temtories and politicai allegiances lose their hold on her writing, as writing itself becornes territory: "Écriture qui aurait pu signifier historiquement mon exterritorialité, et qui devient pourtant peu à peu mon seul véritable territoire" 'Writing that historically could have signified my extcrritonality, but which, instead, little by little is becoming my only real territory' (44). Here I will open a parenthesis and address the probkm that one always runs into when considering autobiography - and especially when talking about the interpenetration of liie and work, autobiography and fiction. The relationship among author/narrator/implied author is, of course, an extremely problematic one; to speak of autobiographical fiction begins a journey down a very slippery slope, as it necessitates speaking of a real author and real Iife experiences. As Sean Burke puts it in his Death and Return of the Author, "Recourse to the author is deemed palaeocritical, the sanctuary of an establishment hankering back to an illusory innocence of criticism before contemporary theorists uncovered the absence of human and expressive qualities in the iiterary text" (17). The problem of autobiography is, of course, that the written
1 and the writing 1 are always and never one and the same. While Roland Barthes, for one, has made a great deal of this problem, Mikhail Bakhtin neatly deflates it by shifting the iocus
from a problem of subjectivity to one of temporality. Only someone who believes in the everpresence of ail time wiii have trouble dit'ferentiating between the writing and written 1's.
An author, even in autobiography, is always outside of narrated events (Bakhtin qtd. in
Todorov 52) and that "to identify oneself absolutely with oneself, io identify one's '1' with
the '1' that I teU is as impossible as to lift oneself up by one's hair" (Bakhtin qtd. in Todorov Djebar's conversion begins with a crisis in writing, an autobiographical moment found in Les alouettes naïves:
dans quarante pages des Alouettes naïves, je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher de parler
de moi, de mon bonheur personnel [. . .] prendre conscience que l'écriture
devient un dévoilement, cela m'a fait reculer [. . .] quand j'ai senti que le
coeur de ce livre commençait à froler ma propre vie, j'ai arrêté de publier
volontairement. (Djebar qtd. in Clerc 57)
in forty pages of Les alouettes naïves, 1 couldn't hclp but speak of myself, of
my persona1 happiness [. . .] the understanding that writing was becoming an
unveiling made me recoil [. . .j when 1 feli that the core of this book was
beginning to touch my private life, 1 stopped publishing voluntarily.
It is a crisis that results in a withdrawal from writing and a turn toward film; it is through film-making that reconciliatior; is made possible,3 and the subsequent rcturn to writing is a return to autobiographical fiction almost exclusively. Whereas her pre-conversion writing uses language as a veil, in the post-conversion writing, language acts as a scalpel (as in
L'amour. la fantasia [Fantasia. An Al rian Calvacade]), as a ~eutralizing,equalizing,
"Le film, on l'a vu, a consacré des sortes de retrouvailles avec la langue maternelle qui ont, en quelque sorte, ratifié cette intuition d'une autre voie possible où l'arabe servirait l'expression autobiographique sans risque de perte de soi" 'Film, we have seen, consecrated a kind of union with the rnother-tongue that, in a way, confimied this intuition of another possible route, whereby Arabic would serve autobiographicai expression without the risk of losing oneself' (Clerc 59). 14 democratizing agent (as in Le blanc de l'Algérie [The White of Alnerial), and occasionaUy as a bamer and a tool for rnaking-strange. It is a porous language, one ihat allows Arabic,
Spanish and Berber words to settle in its cracks. It is a language whose syntax crumbles ai the edges, a language that, in Deleuze's term, stutters; and occasionally - at the height of its moments of violence - it is a dismembered language (as in a short story called "La femme en morceaux" ["The Woman in Pieces"]).
The name plays an important role in Djebar's conversions, both intra- and extra- textual. Apart from circumcision, of course, the most concrete manifestation of a conversion, is the convert's name-change. This name-change signals a new beginning, an abandonment of the former self, and a willingness to rewrite life tiom scratch. Naming, namelessness and above al1 name-changes in Djebar's texts signify particular responses to the possibility and promise of conversion.
Djebar's 1995 novel, Vaste est la a ris on (So Vast the Prison), is a kind of mise-en- abvme of her own literary conversion; it contains linguistic, religious and amorous conversion narratives within the larger framework of a master-narrative of literary conversion. The preface of the novel, entitled "Le silence de l'écriture" ("The Silence of
Writing"), outlines the nature of the narrator's pre-conversion wriiing process and sets up the frame narrative of literary conversion. It begins with the words: "Longtemps, j'ai cru qu'écrire c'étair mourir, mourir lentement" (11) 'For a long the 1 believed that writing meant dying, slowly dying' (11). Pre-conversion writing here acts as a snapshot: "L'éclat de rire -gelé. Le début de sanglot -pétrifié" (11) 'A burst of Iaughter - irozen. The beginnings of a sob - turned to stone' (11). Writing, much like photography, ireezes a moment in time, 15 immobilizes Life, killing it in the process.
The moment of crisis, which marks her initial turning away tiom writing (described at the very beginning of Vaste est la mison) and which sets up her conversion (her tolle leee moment) comes with the word I'edou (the enemy) in the hammam (Turkish baths). The narrator describes her shock in the hammam upon learning that the women of her mother-in- law's region cal1 their husbands 'the enemy':
En vérité, ce simple vocable, acerbe dans sa chair arabe, vrilla indéfiniment le
fond de mon âme, et donc la source de mon Ccriture. . .
Comme si, parce qu'une langue soudain en moi cornait l'autre, parce
que la voix d'une femme, qui aurait pu Ctre ma tante maternelle, venait
secouer l'arbre de mon espérance obscure, ma quête muette de lumiere et
d'ombre basculait, exilée du rivage nourricier, orpheline. (14)
In truth the simple term, bitter in its Arab flesh, bore endlessly into the depths
of my soul, and thus into the source of my writing . . .
Suddenly one language, one tongue, struck the other inside me. The
voice of a woman who could have been my materna1 aunt came to shake the
tree of my hidden hope. My silent quest for light and shade was thrown off
balance, as if 1 had been exiled frorn the nurturing shore, orphaned. (14)
Arabic (mother-tongue) and French (father-tongue) collide within the narrator. This collision
Iater sparks the narrator's interrogation of the relationship between languages in Algeria - a relationship that eventually will be described as an ever-shifting triangle in the resulting 16 novel -and it is a moment which marks the starting point of a new way of considering the reiationship behveen languages, temtory, and writing:
La littérature algérienne [. . .] s'est inscrite constamment dans un triangle
linguistique - une langue du roc et du sol [. . .] - une deuxième langue, celle
du dehors préstigieux de l'héritage méditerranian [. . .] - troisième partenaire
de ce couple à trois, se présente la plus exposée des langues, la dominante, Ia
publique, la langue de pouvoir [. . ,j. (Djebar, Le blanc 272-3)
Algerian literature [. . .j has constantly inscribed itself in a linguistic triangle [.
. .] - [the first is] a langue of rock and earth -a second language, that of the
prcstigious Mediterranean heritage from the outside [. . .]- the third partncr of
this couple of three presents itself as the most exposed of the three languages,
the dominant one, the public one, the language of power [. . .].
These languages change in status with each invasion and according to the political situation of the country. The first language is that of the cliffs and the land - it is Ivbico-bcrbkre
(Lybian-berberhi finah). The second language in the triangle corne out of Mediterranean heritage and has been limited to a literate minority; in the past this language has been Spanish
(in Oran), Latin (in Augustine's the), and today this language is French. The third language is that of political power, the most fluid category, which has changed most frequently and most dramaticaiiy. The language of power has been Latin, Phoenician, Gteek, classical
Arabic, French, and today: modem Arabic.
The word l'edou (the enemy) in the above "tolle leee" passage is one that 17 communicates despair, a stalemate beiween the sexes. It shakes the narrator to such an extent that she begins to re-evaluate her relationship to writing and language: "ce mot donc installa en moi, dans son sillage, une pulsion dangereuse d'effacement" (15) 'this word left in its wake within me a dangerous urge to self-erasure' (15). Here we see the tïrst part of the conversion process: self erasure. Self-erasure and self-creation: the two poles of conversion, whereas in the middle there is silence, in Djebar and her narrator's case -a decade of it. A conversion narrative is always autobiographical and must attempt to Say the unsayable, to narrate this moment of silence in which change occurs. It is an impossible task. We can never tell the story of silence; we can only talk around it, demarcate its limits, telling where it begins and ends. The first nine books of Augustine's Confessions outlinc the prc-conversion period of his life. It is ri pcriod spent searching for truth, which culminates in a moment of crisis conversion. In similar fashion, Djebar's first four books mark the beginning OC her search: a beginning which is marked by her own renaming (Assia Djebar is not her real
name) and quasi-rebirth.
The one truly religious conversion in Vaste est la mison, is that of Thomas d'Arcos to
Islam: "C'est alors - après 1630 -que, pour nous, l'histoire commence" (122) 'That is when
the story begins for us - after 1630' (124). The conversion of the Frenchman has al1 the
required components: circumcision, the recitation of the chahada (English transliteration: the
"shahada") and the assumption of an Islaniic name. Thomas becomes Osman. The convert
comes across a majestic monument -a stele - in Dougga, which is inscribed with a bilingual
text: one of the inscribed languages is Phoenician, and the other WUremain a mystery for
centuries after Thomas-Osmann's encounter with ir. It is no accident that this convert will be 18 the first person to copy the inscription of the monument (which gets passed onto the Vatican and is lost in its archives for two centuries). The mystery language, it is finally determined. is
Berber. Initially al1 the questions surrounding the stele focus on a lest language; it is assumed that the mysterious script represents a language that is no longer spoken. Finally, the question arises: what if this "lost" language is in fact krber, a surviving language more ancient than
Phoenician?
Si cette écriture étrange s'animait, se chargeait Q'une voix au présent, s'épelait
à voix haute, se chantait? Si ce supposé <
tour à tour punique avec Carthage, latin avec les Romains et les romanisés
jusqu'à Augustin, et grec puis arabc treize siècles durant, et qu'ils
continuèrent, génération après génération, à garder vivace pour un usage
endogamique (avec leurs mères, leurs épouses et leurs filles essentiellement),
si ce parler remontait jusqu'à plus loin encore'! (145)
Then, suppose this strange writing came alive, was a voice in the prcsent, was
spoken out loud, was Sung. Suppose this so-called dialect of men who spoke
by turn Punic with Carthage, Latin with the Romans and the romanized until
Augustine's time, and Greek, then Arab[ic] for thirteen centuries, continued,
generation after generation, kept aiive for endogamic use (with their mothers,
their wives, and their daughters). Suppose this speech, this language [. . .]
went back even farther! (147)
This "lost" African language on the stele is in fact tifinagh, the language of the Tuareg, the 19 Berber of southern Algeria, the people the French called "Ies hommes voilés" 'the veiled men' because of the custorn of the men to Wear blue veils in the presence of wornen. This lost language is, of course, not lost at all. It continues to be spoken and Sung, and even written today. In her discussion of the successive discoveries of the stele, of its destruction and eventual re-erection, Djebar depicts the Berber language as the background over which so many other languages have placed themselves. In doing so, Djebar posits that the only possible "original" language (though the notion of any kind cif "original" language in this context is itself questionable) of Aigeria is &rber. Al1 others came with conquerors.
The linguistic triangle in which the stele tlnds its place is one of Berber and
Phoenician (both are inscribed on the stele) and Latin -as the incoming language of power at the moment of the destruction of Carthage. The destruction is recorded by Polybius, the
Greek historian and deported writer. By introducing Polybius in the context of the taIl of
Carthage, Djebar situates herseli in a long tradition of Algerian writing which is nourished by destruction and distinguished by polygamous Ianguage. It is a tradition in which homeland
(through exile and destruction) gives way to language. It is a lradition which includes
Augustine, whorn Djebar reclairns as an Aigerïan and a Berber, and who, like her, writes in the language of the conqueror.
Through her discussion of a much more ancient linguistic triangle, Djebar puts the contemporary Linguistic-political conflict in context and iltustrates how this rivalry is, in tact, a false one (and one which completely displaces the third and only ever-present point of the triangle: Berber). She argues that Arabic is no more the "langue nationale" than French: "en
Algérie, ils appellent l'arabe la <
The linguistic triangles of Vaste est la urison are full of hope. They are an attempt to de-politicize language in Algeria and an attempt to regard the comings and goings of language as a natural (and thus neutral) part of the movement of history. With the accounts of the ever-shifting linguistic triangles and with the story of Osmann and that of Augustine,
Djebar seems to be saying that the moments of brilliance and true greatness in the history of
Aigeria, are thosc: of cultural and linguistic intersection, and that Algeria's true heroes are her converts. A story called "Le corps de Félicie" ("Félicie's Body") (in the collection Oran,
Ianaue morte [Oran. Dead Lanpua~e]),however, puts the easy conclusion that we arc tempted to draw - namely that Djebar's convert is a celebration of hybridity - in question.
"Le corps de Félicie" tells the story of a French woman (Félicie) who married an Algerian man and who has given each of her numerous children a bilingual name. Félicie calls her chiidren only by nicknames -"Titi," "Khaki" etc. - until one day her youngest daughter
Louise/Ourdia insists that she be caîied by her Arabic name (Ourdia): "aucun de ces surnoms ridicules qui nous coupent en petits morceaux!" 'no more ridiculous nicknames that cut us up into iittle pieces!' she tells her mother (Djebar, Oran 294). For a long time, Félicie simply doesn't cdher daughter anything, until one break-through day -the day after her husband's 2 1 death, when Félicie tums to her daughter calling her "Ourdia, ma chérie" 'Ourdia, my dear'
(295). The duality that Félicie has tried to sustain in her children is rejected once and for all.
Upon her death in Pans, Félicie's children conspire to have her buried in Algeria, beside her husband. The story takes place in the 1990s, in a tirne when foreigners were targeted in massacres, and when the body oi a Christian woman would never have been allowed to be buried in an Islarnic cernetery. The children, therefore, posthumously 'convert' their mother by reciting the chahada over her body, and, of course by giving her a new narne. Félicie. now called Yasrnina, the convert - like Augustine - is repatriatcd to Algeria. The convert, it is clear, cannot be hybrid. True conversion requires total abandon of the past and a giving of oneself over to a new state of being. Hyphenated identity is rejected for an eitherlor.
The narrator of Vaste est la riso on is called Isma; it is a namc that we find again and again in Djebar's work. We find characters who go by this name in Oran. lanpue morte, for example, as well as in Ombre sultane (translated as A Sister to Scheherezade). This name
Literally means "the narne" (le nom). A woman whost: name is 'narne,' however, remains strangely nameless. If naming is essential to the conversion process, what kind ol conversion narrative is told by a nameless narrator? The wornen who bear the name 'Isma' in Djebar's texts are homeless, stateless, deterritorialized women. Far from choosing one of the eitherlor options that genuine conversion offers, these women choose neitherlnor - and in this sense, we should perhaps consider them to be failed converts.
We see irorn the dates of this novel that it was written during the massacres of the
1990s, a time when Algeria's writers and inteIlectuals were targeted by the GIA (Grou~es islamiaues armés). A great number were rnurdered in the most brutal fashion imaginable, and 22 the remaining ones had no choice but to leave. The dream of the Algeria that Djebar's generation had fought for seemed irretrievably lost; thus followed a move on her part to prodaim language as the only temtory, and a refusal to choose an eitherlor option. A wornan named Isma cannot convert, because there isn't any viable choice to be made. Anything but an argument for hybridity, this is the acceptance of a kind of statelessness and exterritoriality.
We have seen that Djebar's narratoryspre-conversion writing process is a kind or taxidermy, a doorned attempt at capluring beauty and Me. "La vie s'émiette;" 'Life dissipates;' Djebar writes, "et la trace vive se dilue" (Vaste 11) 'and its living trace dissolves'
(II). Life escapes writing's attempt to record it, Djcbar asks: "Fut-ce pourquoi je me mis à me défier d'une écriture sans ombre? Elle &chait si vite! Je la jetai" (14) 'Was that why I began to mistrust writing? It had no shadow? It dried things up so fast? 1 discarded ity(15).
Wnting dries things up, and writing itsell dries up: these are formulations that we find again and again in Djebar's texts, as ifwriting must stay moist, wet, or bloody in order to remain current, real, and true.
The hope on which Vaste est la arison is built, however, turns to despair at the end of the novel, when it becomes clear that Algeria is spiralling into self-destruction. Writing and language, despite Djebar's own reconciliation, have turned bloody. In a chapter entitled "Le sang de l'écrituren ("The Blood of Writing") she writes the murder of Yasmina who refuses to leave Algecia, and who sacrifices herself, protecting a Polish friend (353-55). lt is a scene that announces Le blanc de I'Alnirie, a text which reproduces this passage again and again,
filling it with another's death each the. In both "Le sang de l'écriture" and Le blanc de
l'Algérie Djebar writes of the biood of others in the blood of others, racing against 23 coagulation, scabbing and the drying of blood, al1 of which signal the healing of a wound.
This attempt to preserve, and the resulting frustration when faced with the inability to preserve a moment in al1 its beauty or pain is a sentiment that we find clearly articulated first in Vaste est la urison, and then continued in Le bIanc de l'Algérie. Djebar's narrators refuse healing. The question that the author-narrator (for it is no longer clear, in fact, who is speaking here) is faced with at the end of Vaste est la mison and al1 the way through Le blanc de 1'Al~Erkis how to write for the dead, how to name a country that has become unrecognizable through violence and finally, how to do al1 this from afar; how ta bear witness in exile:
Aujourd'hui, au terme d'une année de morts obscures, de morts souillées, dans
la ténèbre de luttes fratricides.
Comment te nommer désormais, Ngérie! [. . .]
Les morts qu'on croit absents se muent en témoins qui, à travers nous, disirent
écrire!
Écrire comment? [. . .]
Écrire, les morts d'aujourd'hui désirent icrire: or, avec Ir sang,
comment écrire? [. ..]
Écrire certes même un roman
de la fuite
de la honte
Mais avec le sang même: avec son flux, sa pâte, son jet, sa
croûte pas tout à fait séchée? (345-47) Today, ai the end of a year of dark, incomprehensible deaths, defded deaths,
in the shadows of fratricidai conflicr.
What can we cal1 you now, Algeria! [. . .]
We think the dead are absent but, transformed into witnesses, they want to
write through us.
Wriie how? [. . .]
Write, the dead of today want to write: now, how can one write with
blood? [. . .]
Wnting, of course, even a novel. . .
About flight.
About shame.
But with blood itself: with its tlow, its :)aste, ils spurt, its scab,
that is not yet dry? (356-58)
Vaste est la mison is a novel about a linguistic siruggle and about a writer's struggle with 1the inadequacy of her own expression whcn faced with the burden of wnting for the dead.
Twenty years aiter her return to writing, the old doubts about it resurhce. The author/narrator's conversion is one that is never final, as familiar doubts return at the end of the novel. But as any true believet knows, hith is constantly tesied, and must be renewed continuously in order to remain alive: 1 doubt, therefore 1 betieve.
I would now like to return to the question of Assia Djebar's naine that 1 alluded to very brieny at the beginning of this chapter: specificaiiy, how do we read the fact that Assia
Djebar is not this author's real name? The pen name diebbar was chosen as a phrase (in 25 classical Arabic) that praises 'Allah the intransigent,' but by (mis)spelling it diébar (the accent has since been dropped) the author transformed that classical Arabic into the vernacdar word for 'healer' (Zimra, Afterword Wornen 160). According to the author, the name 'Assia' was chosen because "it was just a family first name that everj'zody liked"
(Djebar quoted in Zirnra, Afterword Wornen 160). But Clarisse Zirnra points to its far- reaching symbolic resonances, namely that in Arabic this word signifies Asia "and thc rnysterious Orient, thus 'orientalizing' its bearer. It also happens to bc the name of the
Egyptian princes who rescued Moses and is so honoured in Algerian lore as a holy woman and called 'Pharoah's sister.' In the vernacular, it designates the flower variously known as the immortelle or the edelweiss" (160). It would therefore seem that Djebar has taken the process of self-annihilation and creation required by conversion more literally than most. In becoming an author, Djebar was reborn in the rnost literal way possible; in addition to giving herself a new name, she gave herself a new birth date August 4, 1936.' Throughout this discussion of conversion 1 have weighed the question of how we can consider the interpenetration of fiction and autobiography, of real experiences with their narrativization - and of the real author with the fictional narrator. Indeed, the real author in question, turns out to be somewhat of a tktion after all.
What Is a Minor Literature? The Case of Algeria
Deleuze and Guattari write in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: "A minor literature doesn't corne frorn a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a
This was Djebar's parents' anniversary, and August 4, 1789 was the day when class privileges were abolished in France. Her real birthdate is June 30, 1936 (June 30 was the eve of Algerian independence) (Zia, Afterword Women 159) 26 major language" (16). Deleuze and Guattari propose three characteristics of minor literature: these are deterritorialization, politicization and collectivity (16). The first characteristic, deterritorialization, is, in my view, the defining feature of minor writing, and the bulk of rny discussion of rninor Literature will centre around rny understanding of this term. Mere, deterritorialization is not meant as exile, at least not the exile of the author, though physical exile has been an important part in the lives of many writers of minor liieratures (including
Djebar); rather here it is language in exile. Deterritorialized language is language literally ripped out irorn the earth by its roots. Deterritorialization allows the speaker of a language to feel its grooves and contours and rough spots with his or her tongue, grooves and contours and rough spots that for major writers are indistinguishable from the roofs of their mouths. It is what makes language vibrate, and as Deleuze writes in a later text ("He Stuttered" in
Essavs Critical and Clinical), it is what makes language stutter. A minor literature has two choices in terms of language: to push its deterritorialization iurthcr, or to polish and nomalize language in a desperate attempt at reterritorialization. It is this tension between deterritorializing and reterritorializing impulses that hels the language of writers of minor literatures, and it is the choices they make when faced with this tension that define their texts.
In Djebar's writing, deterritorialization manifests itself as an attempt to keep language from flowing back to the shores from which it arrived. Her narrators use 'foreign* (in so far as many readers are concemed) words and phrases to transplant the other's language in
Algeria. Using these 'foreign' words, the narrator, builds an embankment that stops her text from flowing back across the Mediterranean to France. This is a strategy that is most actively 27 employed and cultivated in her 1985 novel, L'amour, la fantasia, which tells of the coionization and decoIonization of Algeria. The battle on the ground is reflected in the
Iinguistic battle in the novel. The use of Algerianisms serves to situate the reader within the confhct, either by alienating those unfamiliar with such a vocabulary, or by sharing a kind of inside joke with those who find themselves at home in it.
Two such non-French words are wdin the passage "La tunique de Nessus" ("The
Tunic of Nessus"): rebato and zaouia (L'amour. la fantasia 234). Neither word is explicitly defined in the text. Rebato is a Spanish word meaning an alarm, a cal1 to arms, or a surprise attack; zaouia is an Arabic word signifying an Isbamic brotherhood. No glossary is provided with the original French version of the novel. The prewnce of such non-French words within the text creates a barrier, or, to continue my image, a kind of embankment around it. The narrator holds her language to herseIf, building a gare, and noi giving out the password. The reader, in many cases, must be satisfied with a view from afar, and reconcile him- or herseIf to the inevitability of missing certain srna11 details. Although the authorfnarrator of L'amour, la fantasia is uncompromising in her deliberate atienation of a good percentage of her
Francophone audience, ihe English translator is much more accornrnodating of Djebar's
Anglophone readers. Interestingly, a glossary consisting of seventy-one words is provided in the English translation (translated as Fantasia. An Al~erianCalvacade).
The narrator of L'amour, la fantasia creates a similar embankment with her own body as she writes. By placing her elbow far out in front of her, she prevents her words lrom flowing away as she inscribes them. The words hit the cradle of her am that is pIaced 28 protectively around the page, and thus flow back to the page and to their author: "Écrire la langue adverse, ce n'est plus s'inscrire sous son nez ce marmonnement qui monologue: écrire par cet alphabet devient poser son coude bien loin devant soi, par-derriiire le remblai -or dans ce retournement, l'écriture fait ressac" (245) 'Writing the enerny's language is more than just a matter of scribbling down a muttered monologue under your vcry nase; to use this alphabet involves placing your elbow some distance in front of you to form a bulwark - however, in this twisted position, the writing is washed back to you' (215). It is the coHision of text against embankment, of the waves of her words crashing against the barrier that the writer has constructed that makes language stutter and vibrate.
Deterritorialized language is language npped out from the earth by its roots. In the case of Djebar's writing - unlike in that of Meras's, whcre two distinct linguistic cornmunities have lived side by side for centuries, and where the muvc to a lanpue adverse is the result of the disappearance of the author's first language of expression from the territory altugether - language here is relocated. It is brought from France to Ngena, where it evolves and takes on its own rhythms, shape and vocabulary. This transplantation of language is not, in fact, a tnte re-rooting of it. Deterritorialized language grows without mil. And if we wanted to follow this horticultural metaphor a little further, we could say that deterritorialized language, in the case of Algeria, is hydroponic. It is language that flourishes without sail, Lri an artificial and careiuliy controiied environment. Language herc is an exotic plant, which must be culiivated in a green house, so as to survive uniamiliar local conditions.
The rebato (surprise attack) of Djebar's L'amour. la fantasia occurs in a battle 29 between national tongues and mernories that takes place on the no-man's land that is the embankrnent located off the Coast of Algeria in the Mediterranean sea. Mother- and father- tongues (the oral and the written) are entangled in a fight for supremacy. "Francen5 with its presidio (gamson) within the narrator, has the upper hand, while the rnother-tongue launches surprise attacks, breaking through into the iext:
la langue française, corps et voix, s'installe en moi comme un orgueilleux
préside, tandis que la langue maternelle, toute en oralité, en hardes
dépenaillées, résiste et attaque, entre deux essoufflements. Le rythme du
ccrebato>> en moi s'éperonnant, je suis a la fois l'assiégé étranger et
l'autochtone partant à Ia mort par bravade, illusoire effervescence du dire et de
l'écrit. (245)
the French tongue, with its body and voice, has established a proud presidio
within me, while the mother-tongue, al1 oral tradition, al1 rags and tatters,
resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. In time to the rhythm of the
rebato, 1 am alternately the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to
die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and wtitten word.
Here the narrator herself becomes a no-man's land of language and culture, and as such, the
The Algerians cailed the French army and French colons sirnply "la France" (rather than "les Français") during the colonial war, the colonial period, and the Algerian War. 30 narrator embodies !mtJ the besieged foreigner and the battered native. There is never a clear victor in this battle: the French language cannot be O& liberator as long as it remains stained with the blood of ancestors, while the mother tongue cannot be completely victorious either, as long as it continues to imprison and cloister the narrator's cousins and sisters.
This war of languages cornes to a halt in the only way that it can: with a truce.
Washing up onto shore, looking for a place of linguistic armistice, French as language of expression is plundered from the enerny: stolen and retooled according to the needs and rhythms of its user. The resulting language is french (lower case; one of many frcnches that we find throughout Africa, North America, Europe and parts of Asia), as opposed to French
(capitalized). Students of enelish literatures have been aware of this distinction between capitalized and lower case languages for sorne tirne:6
The appropriation of the language is essentially a subversive strategy, for the
adaptation of the 'standard' language to the demands and requirements of the
place and soctety into which it has been apptopriated amounts to a fat more
subtle rejection of the political power of the standard language. In Chinua
Achebe's words this is a process by which the Ianguage is made to bear the
weight and the texture of a different experience. In doing so it becomes a
different language. By adapting the alien language to the exigencies of a
mother grammar, syntax, vocabulary and by giving a shape to the variations of
See Braj B. Kachru's The Aichernv of En~lishand the chapter "Language" in the Post-colonial Studies Reader. See dso Ashcroft, Griïfiths and Tiffin's The Em~ireWrites -Back. 3 1 the speaking voice, such writers and speakers construct an 'english' which
amounts to a very different linguistic vehicle t'rom the received standard
colonial 'English.' (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tifiin, Post-Colonial Studies 283)
In L'amour, la fantasia, it is the infiltration of Spanish, hrabic, and in other passages, krber into Djebar's French that signais her move to french. It is a distinction that is more difficutt to rnake in French, but is one which is pointed to in the differçntiation between littérature francaise and littérature franco~hone.The problem with this distinction is that the idea of a francoohonie can itself be seen as a neo-colonial concept, which is how Rachid Boujedra regards it in FIS de la haine:
Exemple: ce n'est pas par hasard que le concept de francophonie a commenci
à s'esquisser avec l'indépendance de l'Algérie, au début des années 60 [. . .].
Ce concept de francophonie qui est, à la fois, tautologique et injuste, n'est en
réalité qu'un relais hautement politique, un substrat extrêmement subtil, pour
perpétuer un état de fait, fa domination coloniale Clevtie au rang de grande
fratrie universelle et confortable, génératrice d'une passion amoureuse [. . .].
La francophonie serait donc une sorte de marque idéologique qui
plonge dans cette region ambiguë de la culture où quelque chose
d'indéfectiblement politique imprègne tout, rature le monde, balise le
pathétique, défigure le sens et détrône le conscient en forant profondément ses
strates, son humus et ses composants. En quelque sorte, ce concept
tautologique fonctionne selon les données de l'idéologie dominante, 32 arrogante, méprisante pour l'autre. Mépris de la langue de l'autre, donc de
l'autre, tout court. (29-20)
Example: it is not an accident that the concept of franco~honiebegan to make
itself apparent with the independence of Algeria at the beginning of the 60s [. .
.].This concept of franco~honieis at once tautological and unjust, in reality it
is nothing but a highly political stage, an extremely subtle substrate used to
perpetuate a state of fact, colonial domination elevated to the level of a large
and comfortable brotherhood [. . .]. The franco~honieis therefore a kind of
ideological marking that dives into this ambiguous region of culture where
something indefectibly political impregnates evrrything, scratching out the
world, marking out the pathetic, disfiguring sense and dethroning thc
conscious by boring deep into its strata, its humus, and cornponents. In a way.
this tautological concept functions according to the conditions of the
dominant, arrogant ideology, which is disdainful for the other. Disdain of the
other's langage, therefore of the other, period.
The goal underlying the francophonie movement, according to Boudjedra, is to CO-opt
francophone literatures and cultures in order to regain some of the political control that was
lost through decolonization. Although Djebar's tactic of infusing her text with 'foreign'
words may, on the one hand, be seen as pandering to the exoticism that some champions and
fans of francophone writing seek out, it may, on the other hand, be seen as an attempt at 33 french writing on her own ternis: a kind of titerary third way that the author invents as she writes.
"The second characteristic of rninor literaturcs," write Deleuze and Guattari, "is that everything in [hem is political [. . ,] its crarnped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes al1 the more necessary, indispensable, rnagnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it" (17). In crnmped spaces, such as the harem, the hammam or the Casbah, small gestures - like the use of the word 17edou("the enerny") or the use of a nickname - resonate loudly. In this sense we may speak of rninor literatures as bcing synccdochic. Kcywords and gestures stand in for much larger, more signiticant histories. We have seen that the use of the word I'edou by the narrator's mother-in-law in Vaste est la risa an signifies a centuries-old battle of the sexes; and the use of and resistance to a nickname by Fklicie and hcr daughter rcspectively in "Lc corps de Félicic" signifies an inter-generational struggle of language and identity. In the fictional worlds of Djebar's novels, French is a poisonous gift given by a father to his little girl. It is a language of both liberation and exile.
A passage called "La tunique de Nessus" ("The Tunic of Nessus") in L'amour. la fantasia makes reference to the fatai gifr of the French language that the narrator received from her father. The intertext here is Sophocks' The Women of Trachis. The play tells the story of Nessus, a centaur who tried to rape Deianira, the wife of Heracles. When Nessus was dying, after having been hit by Heracles with an arrow tipped with poisoned blood, Nessus made a gift of the blood to Deianira, which was supposed to bring back husbands who had 34 strayed. When her husband, Heracles, returned with a concubine, Deianira gave him the tunic stained with magical blood in hope of winning him back. Instead of turning her husband around, the tunic poisoned Heracles and he dies. In Djebar's novel, the French language, like the tunic, is stained with blood; it is simultaneously a fatal and life-saving gift. The gift of language, like the gift of the blood, is also received as a result of rape (the rape of Ngeria, both literal and figurative, through colonization), but it is a gift passcd on to the daughter in good faith and with love. While the poison on the tunic is activated by heat and sunlight, the narrator's gift of language lies dormant untiI she steps out into the sun: as an adolescent "ivre quasiment de sentir la lumière sur la peau" (243) 'well nigh intoxicated with the sensation of sunlight on my skin' (213). At this moment the narrator awakens to the consciousness of the double nature of this gift - that iact that it may bc a curse as well as a liberation - and experiences a pull between the two languages, and the two realms (female and male): "mon
<
(243) 'isn't it my "duty" to stay behind with my peers in the gynaeceum?' (213).
"Je cohabite avec la langue française" (243) '1 cohabit with the French language'
(213), the young narrator tells us. Here, "la France" (as the women in the novel cal1 the enemy) is a lover, an enemy suitor to whom her father handed her over at too young an age; a husband against whom the narrator rebels, whom she resents, but somehow loves at the same tirne: "Le français est ma langue marâtre. QuelIe est ma langue mère disparue, qui m'a abandonnée sur le trottoir et s'est enfuie?" (244) 'French is my stepmother tongue. Which is my long-lost mother-tongue, that left me standing [on the sidewalk] and disappeared?' (214). 3s French is the fatal gift which caused her mother-tongue to abandon her. The "father-tongue"
(a term which 1 prefer to Djebar's stepmother-tongue) takes the place of the mother-tongue, causing the nanator to be torever exiled from the realm of women, the society of the hammams and tenaces.
Sandwiched between the male and female spheres, Djebar's narrators are detemtoriaIized wornen. They inhabit cramped spaces: occasionally, this cramped space is physical (again, the harem, or the hammam, or the Casbah) but more oiten than not, the cramped space is an intellectual one of neitherlnor. It is neither male, nor female; it is neither entirely Algerian nor exclusive~yFrench, but the spacc in between. It is with the third characteristic of rninor literature, that of collectivity, that gender issues intensify within this crarnped space of minor fiterature. When Djebar's narrator l'inds herself telling the war stories of the wornen of her tribe in L'amour. la fantasia, she tïnds that it is through her exile from the world of women that she is in a curiously betier position to speak for (write for) those women. Telling the stories of her 'strange little sisters' is possible, it seems, only fiom the crack in beiween the wo spheres.
Minor literature functions in a system in which, like it or not, authors find themselves aligned by blood, linguistic, and, especially in the case of Algena, political ties. Each enunciation - whether brilliant, contentious or banal - resonates within the community because it has been clairned by the community, or in the case of Ngeria, because the entire community is assigned blame by a third party (here, the most radical of the Islamists). In minor writing, "literature linds itself [. . .] charged with the role and function of the 36 collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation" (Deleuze and Guattari 17). In Algeria this has rneant speaking out against the inté~ristemovement and against political Islam and its most radical advocates. French, then, is the language of secular intellectuals who have opposed the rise of the intégriste rnovernent and of the FIS (Front islamiaue du salut),' a political party formed in the late 1980s and banned in the 1990s.
Language, especially French expression, in Algeria is political not only in the sense of the gender and linguistic politics as discussed above, but also in the narrowest, most literal sense of the word politics as the affairs of the state. Algeria has in recent years seen a struggle for political supremacy behveen the sacred and the secular. There, writers have been targeted
''ne formation of the Front islamique du salut was officially announced on February 18, 1989, after the endorsement of a new constitution which gave Algerians the right to form "associations of a political character" (WiUis 113). Although everyone cxpected the FIS to be outlawed, as Tunisia and Egypt had banned political parties organized on "an exclusively coniessional basis," to everyone's shock, the FIS was formally endorsed on Sept 16, 1989 (Willis 119). The FIS immediately began to mobilize itself, gaining hup support through mosques. The local elections of June 1990 ended with a landslide FIS victory. In preparation for national elections (1991), the FLN (Front national de libération) changed the electoral boundaries and weighting of votes between the (pro-FIS) north and (pro-FLN, predominantly Berber) south, so as to favour the FLN (7000 voters in the south carried same weight as 17 000 electors in Algiers). The FLN was accused of gerrymandering, protests ensued, and the political violence in Algeria began. Thousands of FIS leaders were arrested; access to mosques was controlled by the army; in 1990-1991, evidence of the fact that armed rebel groups were beginning to form thernselves began to appear. The FIS was aiiowed to re-enter the political scene for the first vote of legislative elections, but after a massive victory, President Chadli called for the cancellation of the second ballot. The canceiiation of the electoral process was met with opposition on the part of the FIS. The FIS leadership was anested and violent clashes ensued when the regime tried to replace the imams of the mosques (February 7-9, 1991). Five new detention centres were set up in the Sahara to house between 5,000 and 30,000 Islamists who had ken arrested and imprisoned. The FIS was formaiiy dissolved by an Algiers court on March 4,1992. 3 7 and, in some cases: killed by medmilitant groups because they write in French, the language of the enemy. In former years, French was the language of the invading army - a strictly military enemy - while it has since become the language not merely of a military enemy, but that of an ideological one. The choice of language in this context signifies ideological and political atlegiances, and so, in what has become a very real war of languages with very real casualties, writing and one's choice of language are never politically neutral.
From Stuttering to Dismembement
Minor literature makes language stutter and vibrate. In Djcbar's writing of the late
1980s and '90s, this vibration threatens to become violent, tearing the subject apart. The language of the other is one that cuis the subject up into little pieces, as Ourdia tells her mother in "Le corps de Félicie" (Q~J 294). It is one that, in L'amour. la fantasia, acts as a vivisector's scalpel:
Tenter l'autobiographie par les seuls mots français, c'est, sous le lent scalpel
de l'autopsie à vif, montrer plus que sa peau. Sa chair se desquame, semble+
il, en lambeaux du parler d'enfance qui ne s'écrit plus. Lcs blessures
s'ouvrent, les veines pleurent, coule le sang de soi et des autres, qui n'a jamais
séché. (182)
To aitempt an autobiography using French words alone is to lend oneself to
Djebar wrïies of the kWng OC authors in Le blanc de 1' AIeérie (1995). Novelist Tahar Djaout and poet Youssef Sebti were both brutaily kiiied by the GIA (Groupes islamiaues armés) in 1993. 38 the vivsector's scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes
off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my
childhood. Wounds are reopened, veins weepo one's own blood flows and that
of others, which has never dried. (156)
In Vaste est la urison, the narrator recounts a dream in which she amputates her vocal cords. in doing so, she amputates her language ("la lan~ue,"and as such, her tongue):
Et ce rêve récurrent qui hante mes nuits! Au tond de ma bouche ouverte, une
pâte molle et visqueuse, une glaire stagne, coule peu a peu et je m'enfonce
dans le malaise irrémédiablement.
Il me faut arracher cette pâte de mon palais, elle m'étouffe: je tente de
vomir, je vomis quoi, sinon une puanteur blanchâtre, enracinée au plus
profond de mon gosier. Ces dernières nuits, l'encombrent pharyngien a été pis
: il m'a fallu couper au couteau une sorte de muscle inutile qui m'écorche,
crachat enserré à mes cordes vocales.
Ma bouche demeure béante; mes doigts tenaces s'activent entre mes
dents, un spasme me tord l'abdomen, rancoeur ou embarras irrépressible. Je ne
ressens pas l'horreur de cet état :j'ai pris la lame, je tâche de trancher tout au
fond, lentement, soigneusement, cette glu suspendue sous ma glotte. Le sang
étalé sur mes doigts, ce sang qui ne m'emplit pas la bouche, semble soudain
léger, neutre, un liquide prêt non à s'écouler, plutôt à s'évaporer au-dedans de
mon corps. (338-39) 39 And this recurrent drearn that haunts my nights! In the bottom of my open
mouth a soft, viscous paste, phlegm, stagnates, then gradually flows and 1 sink
irremediably into this feeling of sickness.
i have to get this paste off my palate; it is smothering me; 1 try to
vomit. What do 1 vomit other than a whitish stench stuck deep down in my
throat? These last few nights the blockage in my pharynx has been worse: 1
have had to take a knife and cut some kind of useless muscle that hurts me,
spit covering my vocal chords.
My rnouth still hangs open; my persistent fingers are busy arnong my
teeth, a spasm wrenches my abdomen - rancor or irresistible nausea. 1 do not
experience the horror of this state: 1 have picked up the blade, 1 try to cut al1
the way down, slowly, carefully, to the bottom of this gluey stuff hanginy
under my glottis. Blood is al1 over my fingers, this blood not tïlling my mouth
suddenly seems light, neutral, a liquid prepared not to flow out but to
evaporate insidc my body instead. (349)
It is the father-tongue that is cut away in this dream. The authorlnanator removes her voice in a gesture of symbolic castration. The use of castration imagery throughout Djebar's writing is self-conscious and deliberate, and the invocation of Lacan as intertext is clear. The author here tropes the image of Lacanian castration (dismemberment), a castration that is necessary, in the Lacanian system, in order for the subject to cross over into the symbolic sphere, the tocus of language. The subject crosses over into the symbolic only after it has been fragmented, dismembered, cas~rated:~"language is there [in the symbolic sphere] and the
An interesting intertext to Djebar's narratoc's self-imposed dismemberment is Iranian writer, Reza Baraheni's text "The Dismemberrnent." It is thc story of a dismernberment staged for a large crowd. Although the text is published as a stand-alonc story, "The Dismernberment" is actuaIIy part of a novel called The Infernal Davs of Asa-ve It takes place al1 in one day, and it explores the power dynarnic between the young Arnir, Mahmoud, and his slave-boy Ayaz. A blending of extreme violence and eroticism, the novel beyins with the scene of the dismemberment. First, tied to a rack, the victim's hands are cut off, then his Ceet, and finally his tonguc is extricated with a pair of scissors:
'And now his tongue! And now his tongue! And now his tongue!' And when this had been repeated a number of times in €di chorus, we lowercd the spears. We took the feet of the ends of the spears and threw them into the bucket, and without keeping them waiting, proceeded to answer the hearty shouts of the people: we requested a long and sharp pair of scissors, and when they brought them we requested a ladder, and when they had brought the ladders, two ladders, one for Mahmoud and one for me. we ascended them to tear out the roots of his speech, of the implement of speech . . . By cutting out his tongue we forced him io accept strangulation as his fate. We converted the tongue into a mernory in his mind and himself into a captive of the tongueless ruins of his memory. We taught hirn to keep out tyranny imprisoned in his mind; by cutting out his tongue we made hirn his own prisoner, keeper OC his own prison and prisoner of himself. ("The Dismemberment" 258-60)
What we don't know from this Grst scene is that the man on the rack is the young Ayaz's father. Ayaz too, like Djebar's narrator, cuts out his father('s)-tongue:
We bound hirn within silent waiis, unknown waUs, timeless walls, tongueless walls. We forced him not to think, and if he should think not to speak, because he no longer had a tongue; the tongue that moved freely in his mouth, pushing words out through his lips and teeth, words concrete, sane, emotional and intellectual, had been cut out by the roots, and the slippery, blood-covered tongue, blood fresh and brightiy colored, was held in Mahmoud's hand, and Mahmoud tossed it into a tub which had ken placed beside the buckets. Words ceased to exist, and he forgot ietters and sounds and words and speech: the joyous, lyrical g's, the h's of shimmering celebration, the g's of steely power, the blazing Ys, the pain-diminishing &s he forgot, p's spitting upon the rsfoundering in rnisery . . . he forgot al1 connections: swailowing them deep into his mind, affixing deaf and dumb locks to them, hiding them away 41 question is how an individual subject gets inside it" (Miller 34). Yet, in Djebar's troping of
Lacanian castration, the subject does not merely enter language; rather, by entering the symbolic sphere, the subject becomes language:
J'exerce cet effort d'amputation avec précision: je ne demande pas si je
souffre, si je me blesse, surtout si je vais demeurer sans voix.
Chaque nuit, l'effort musculaire de cet enfantement par la bouche, de
cette mise au silence me lancine. Je vomis quoi, peut-être un long cri
ancestral. Ma bouche ouverte expulse indéfiniment la souffrance des autres,
des ensevelies avant moi, moi qui croyais apparaître à peine au premier rai de
la première lumière.
Je ne crie pas, je suis le cri. (339)
1 perform this attempted amputation very carefully: 1 do not ask myself if 1 am
suffering, or if 1 am wounding myself, and especially not whether or not 1 will
remain voiceless.
Every night 1 am tormented by the muscular effort of giving birth
through the mouth this way, this silencing. 1 vomit something, what? Maybe a
long ancestral cry. My open mouth expels, continuously, the suffering of
in the tongueless ceii of siience . . . .We, with a simple pair of scissors, had driven him back into the dungeon of his memory. We had thrown open a cleft in his mind and had buried his tongue in the small grave of that cleft. ("The Disrnemberment" 260) 42 others, the suffering of the shrouded women who came before me, 1 who
believed 1 was only just appearing at the first ray of the first light.
1 do not cry, 1 am the cry. (350)
What does it mean to become language? For this author-narrator it is the only way to bear wiiness to the self-dest~ctionof her country and her people. The writer, in entering the symbolic, becomes a channel for the cries of the past and present:
Je ne crie pas, je suis le cri tendu dans un vol vibrant et aveugle; la procession
blanche des aïeules-fantômes derrière moi devient armée qui me propulse, se
lèvent les mots de la langue perdue qui vacille, tandis que les mâles au-devant
gesticulent dans le champ de la mort, ou de ses masques. (339)
1 do not cry, 1 am the cry, stretched out into resonant blind flight; the white
procession of ghost-grandmothers behind me becomes an army propelling me
on; words of the quavering, lost language rise up while the males out in front
gesticulate in the field of death or of its masks. (350)
The cutting of the vocal cords, the narrator has told us' is meant tu stop the process of adding fuel to the fire in Algeria. She tells us of her impression ihat the writing of past death was itself adding to the present death toll: "A force d'écrire sur les morts de ma terre en ff ammes, le siècle dernier, j7ai cm que le sang des hommes aujourd'hui (le sang de l'Histoire et l'étouffement des femmes) remontait pour maculer mon écriture, et me condamner au siIence" (337) '1 thought that, by dint of writing about those who died last century in my 43 country in flames, the blood of men today (the blood of History and of the oppression of women) was nsing again to splatter my writing and condemn me to silence' (347). Strangely, in cutting out her vocal chords, the nanator achieves a new level of collectivity. She now no longer s~eaksfor her people, but instead she becomes their voice.
Language for Djebar's narrators is at once life-saving, and soaked wiih blood. In "La femme en morceaux," a French teacher, Atyka, reads to her students a story from the
Thousand Nights and One Ni~ht.The story takes place in Bagdad, and it tells of a young wife who is pregnant with her fourth child. Afraid that she will not be able to survive another pregnancy, the woman languishes in her house. The only thing that she desires arc apples, for which her husband travels ten days to buy. He returns with three apples worth their weighl in gold, which he presents to his beloved wife. The next day hc cncounters a slave in the market who has an apple. When asked where he got it, the slave answcrs that his beloved gave it tu him as a token of her love. Upon returning home, the husband confronts his wife, who now
has only two apples. Of course, the husband assumes that his wife has been unfaithful. fn a fit
of rage, he siashes her throat, and cuts her up into piccrs. Wrapping her (in a gesture that
mirrors the dizzying mise-en-abvme of The Thousand Ni~htsand One Night) first in a
shroud, then in a carpet, he then lays her in a basket, then in a box of olive wood, and tosses
her dismembered body into the Tigris River. Only later does he learn that the slave had stoIen
the apple from their son, and that his wife had of course been innocent.
This is the tale of Sheherazade turned on its head. While the narrator of The Thousand
Ni~htsand One Ni~htprolongs her stories as a strategy for staying alive, Atyka must hurry to 44 finish her story, and wonders if she will have the time to hish telling it: "Demain, aurai-je fini le conte?" 'Tomorrow, wiii 1 have finished the tale?' (207),she wonders. She will not.
Armed men immediaiely enter Atyka's classroom: "Un bruit violent et rhythmé de pas se rapproche à l'extérieur. Les battants de la porte s'ouvrent grands, dans une poussée. La classe entière s'immobilise" 'A violent and rhythmic noise of footsteps approaches from outside.
The double doors open wide in a single movement. The entire class freezes' (207). Atyka is accused (in very good French) of teaching obscene stories. The children of the class are instructed to lie under the tables and close their eyes. Atyka is shot in the heart, and then beheaded. A single student, Omar, witnesses her death: "Atyka, tête coupée, nouvelle conteuse, Atyka parle de sa voix ferme. Une mare de sang s'itale sur le bois de la table, autour de sa nuque. Atyka continue le conte. Atyka, femme en morceaux" 'Atyka, beheaded, new storyteller, Atyka speaks in her firm voice. A pooI of blood spreads on the wood of the table, around her neck. Atyka continues the tale. Atyka, woman in pieces' (21 1). Language, here, has become soaked with Sheherazade's blood. Once life-saving. it now becomes powerless: or worse, it now turns against the storyteller, becoming the cause of her death.
Stories no longer save their narrator; rather the narrator is killed because of them. Language tears its speaking subject apart.
The problem of naming and namelessness that we encountered in the above discussion of conversion and the name Isma comes back here. We only learn that the narrator of Vaste est la prison bears the name Isma about three-quarters of the way through the novel.
It is brought up once again at the very end where the narrator/author (it is no longer clear 45 who, in iact, is speaking) laments the self-destruction of Aigeria. First, the author asks if she should, once again cail her narcator Isma, and then, several pages later, she poses the question of how to name Algeria:
Oui, comment te nommer, Aigérie [. . .]
Je ne te nomme pas mère, Aigérie amère
que j 'icris
que je crie, oui, avec ce cc P >> de l'oeil
L'oeil qui, dans la langue de nos femmes, est fontaine
Ton oeil en moi, je te fuis, je t'oublie, 6 aïeule d'autrefois! (347)
Yes, how can one speak of you, Aigeria? . . .
1 do not cal1 you mother, bitter Aigeria,
That 1 wriie,
That 1 cry, voice, hand, eye
The eye that in the Ianguage OF our womçn is a fountain.
Your eye within me, 1 flee irom you, I forget you, O grandmother of bygone
days! (358)
Similarly, the young Bagdad wife remains narneless in "La femme en morceaux" because she is dismembered: "elle restera hélas sans prénom, se dit Atyka, comment prénommer un personnage d'abord en morceaux?" 'she will, alas, remain without a first name, Atyka says to herself, what name should one give a character who is in pieces from the start?' (169). In 46 order to be named, both Atyka and the authorlnarrator of Vaste est la prison teU us, one must be whole. By asking the question, "comment te nommer, Algérie?" 'what to cal1 you,
Algeria?' (347), the author/narrator suggests to the reader that an Algeria that is tearing itself apart cannot be named either.
Through her dismemberment, Atyka becomes both Sheherazade and "la femme en morceaux" 'the woman in pieces,' both the storyteller and her tale. The namator's story ends with a moment of macabre impossible narration: Atyka's severed head finishes telling the story of Scheherazade to Omar, the only eye-witness of her death: "Il dira plus tard -que sa dernière phrase n'était plus celle de Shéhdrazade, non, mais la sienne [. . .]: 'La nuit, c'est chacun de nos jours, mille et un jours ici, chez nous à . . ."' 'He will later say - that her final sentence was no longer that of Sheherazade, no, but her own [. . .]: "Night, is each of our days, a thousand and one days here, at home in . . ."' (213). Her last sentence breaks off. As
Atyka expires, she passes her own voice on, in turn, to the next generation. Omar, the young eye-witness is haunted ("hanté") by questions as to what happened to Aiyka's voice. Mer body is gone, he knows, but what happened to her voice? His question is answered when her voice replaces the questions and, in turn, begins to haunt him. The boy turns to the colour white, the colour of obiivion in Djebar's textual worlds:
Omar ne supporte plus que le blanc [. . .j ne contemple que le blanc passi [. . -1.
Le blanc, le regard d'Omar le quête pour éviter les mots qui le hantent,
qui le font absent, parti loin, si loin, dans le Bagdad d'autrefois [. . .]. 47 Dans la ville blanche d'aujourd'hui et si loin du Tigre, Omar entend
sans cesse Haroun el Rachid le calife, devant le corps de la femme en
morceaux, sangloter. (214-5)
Omar can stand nothing but white now [. . .] contemplates nothing but past
whiteness [. . .].
White, the gaze of Omar searches it out in order to avoid the words
that haunt him, that make him absent, journeying Car away in Bagdad of long
ago [. . .].
In the white city of today and so far from the Tigris, Omar ceaselessly
hears Haroun el Rachid, the caliph, in Gont of the body of the woman in
pieces, weeping.
Omar is the unwilling witness, burdened with the voice of the dead.
The White of Mourning: Channeliing the Dead in Le blanc de l'Algérie
The despair that we encounter at the end of Vaste est la urison announces Djebar's
1995 text, Le blanc de l'Algérie. Djebar dedicated this raw, tortured text to the memory of her three 'disappeared' (brutally murdered) friends: Mahfoud Boucebci, M'Hamed
Boukhobza, and Abdelkader Ailoula. The violence that is pointed to at the very end of Vaste est la urison has escalated here to its worst and most terrifying point because of its anonymity, unpredictability and lack of centre. Non-state terror, Like that of Algeria in the
1990s, functions as a rhizome: "a rhizome may tx broken, shattered at a given spot, but it 48 wiii start up again on one of its old lines or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants
because they fonn an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has
been destroyer (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 9). Similarly, the terrorists that
Algeria has fostered function as a network of loosely connected cells which simply break up
and reproduce when attacked.
The first part of Djebar's Le blanc de I'Aleérie describes in detail both the day of
each of her friends' deaths and then, in turn, each of their funerals. She imagines them - a
psychiatrist , a sociologist and a playwright - in their last moments of lifc: "quand ils sont
tombés, l'un après l'autre, abattus, l'un debout, dressé de toute sa haute taille, au pied de
l'escalier de son immeuble, lui la tête en une scconde [rouie. le second, et le troisième,
poitrine lacérée, déchirée au couteau, et ils le cernent, et ils I'ensangiantent, et. . ." 'when
they fell, one after the other, slaughtered, one standing ta11 in the stairwell of his apartment
building, his head instantly pierced by a bullet, the second and third, chest slashed, tom open
with a k~ife,and they surround him, and they drench him in blood . . .' (Il).
In this text Djebar, the narrator, addresses her friends, whom she imagines as
murmuring shadows and whispering haloed saints who visit her wherever and whenever, but
always far away from Algeria. She speaks to thcm in "their" language: in a French that is one
of neutrality. This language is a private one, and acts as an equalizing force. Their French (in
a way that is reminiscent of the utopic fantasies of Esperantists) erases differences between
them that wouId be aii too apparent in Arabic: "conversant en arabe ensemble, nous
devenions, par excès, moi une bourgeoise des temps anciens, et lui [Kader, l'ami dramaturge 49 de Djebar], un viiiageois rude et frustre!" 'speaking to one another in Arabic, 1 becarne too much the bourgeoise of the olden days, and he [Kader, Djebar's playwtight friendl a rough and rugged villager!' (16). In speaking to her friends directly, Djebar seeks to find a language that will allow her to maintain a connection with her absent loved ones: "Je ne demande rien: seulement qu'ils nous hantent encore, qu'ils nous habitent. Mais dans quelle langue?" '1 ask nothing: just that they keep haunting us, that they inhabit us. But in what languagc?' (BO), she writes. The possibility of a colonial languagc becoming neutral in a post-colonial çontext is, of course, not exclusive to Algeria. Braj 8. Kachru comrnents on the similar neutralizing power of English in South Asia. He writes:
Neutralization [. . .] is a Iinguistic strategy used IO 'unload' a linguistic item
from its traditional, cultural and emotional connotations by avoiding its use
and choosing an item from another code. The borrowed item has referential
meaning, but no cultural connotations in the context of the specific culture [. . 4. [qhe power of neutralization is associated with English in two ways.
First, English provides - with or without 'mixing' - an additional code that
has referential meaning but no cultural overtones or connotations [. . .].
Second, such use of English develops new code-mixed varietics of languages.
Lexicaiization from English is particularly preferred in the contexts of kinship,
taboo items, science and technology, or in discussing sex organs and death. (9)
In the case of Le blanc de l'Algérie, the former colonizerTslanguage neutralizes class differences between friends. It creates a level playing field, allowing speakers to step out of origins that compiicate their relations. Even so, Djebar's seerningly innocuous move in designating 'her' French as a neutral language is in fact an extremely provocative one in a place where no language is neutral. The conflict at the root of the violence is of course rnuch more than simply a linguistic one. Its roots are clearly also social, political, econornic, religious and, perhaps above all, class-based.1° Language, thcrefore, is a syrnptom rather than
'me status of Arabic in independent Ngeria was and stiil is extremeiy problematic. ûecause of the diglossia of Arabic (it is an inherently bilingual language with a vertical structure), the project of Arabising Ngeria meant that, for al1 intents and purposes, a completely new language had to be taught to the entire country, as classical, literary Arabic has IittIe to do with the modern Arabic spoken there. "Arabisation" programs, which began in schools irnmediately after independencc as a part of the Révolution culturelle, created a distinct divide in Algerian society, in that thcy created an entire generation of unernployablc people. The systern turned out far mure Arabic- speaking students ("Arabisants") than the administrative sector (which was largely still Francophone) could absorb. Corporations also preferred Francophones to deal with overseas clients. This divide proved to be one of class -the poorer students being "Arabisants" and the Francophones being richer (though wealthier "Arabisants" chose to study Islamic law and scripture as well). Eventually these two groups - the disgruntled, unemployed, urban "Arabisant poor" and the deeply religious "Arabised well-educated, politicized upper classes would provide the backbone of the Islamist rnovement in Algeria. The movement was born on university campuses. The first instance of the wcaring of the hediab, not a North Airican custom, occurred in 1967 (Willis 59). The 1970s saw clashes between Arabophone and Francophone students. The Algerian Berbers - who were largely Francophone due to the colonial regime's policy of divide and conquer, whereby the Berber minority received superior education and employment opportunities to the Arabiç-speakiny population - lelt their culture and social standing was threatened because of the new regime's policy of Arabisation, and thus strongly opposed it. After the assassination of President Boudiaf, the armed group MIA (Mouvement islamiaue armé) resumed the guerilla war it had waged against the government between 1982 and 1987 when it had launched individual attacks against security forces. Another amed group which formed itself at this time called itself Takfir and was comprised of Afghan veterans. These amed groups were spiintered by nature and unwilling to accept central authority from the outset. Further spiintering, however, was caused by the regime iiself because of ifs attacks on their meetings. The groups splintered into smaiier, more a cause. Nevertheless, it is a syrnptom that interests me here.
While multilingualism has always been a part of the Aigerian expenence - 1 have already pointed to Djebar's portrayal of the Algerian linguistic landscape as one of ever- shifting triangIes in Vaste est la D~SO~- Djebar's Le blanc de l'Algérie portrays a society bitterly and violently divided between two languages: Arabic and French. It is an Algeria where ordinary citizens must arm themselves and where no writer is safe that gives birth to
Djebar's text. Le blanc de l'Algérie is a text of pure mourning that reads like an open wound
(here the "sang de l'écriture" 'the blood of writing' used to write Vaste est la prison is still wet), and a text that angrily inscribes violence and refuses consolation. It is a kind of anti- elegy. Traditional elegy, in shaping and ordering grief, and in abstracting and objectitjring the dead, leads the poet on an affective course from anger and despair to consolation. Jahan
Ramazani, in his study of the modern elegy, points to the refusa1 of orthodox consolation
unpredictable and secretive irrdependent units. At this time, armed Isiarnist groups began aggressively recruiting young men -the average age of whom was no more than 25. The GIA (Grouues islamiques armés) in particular began to recruit in urban centres among the hittistcs - young men leit unemployable in the wake of Arabisation (the term hittiste derives from the Arabic word for waI1, hit. and refers to the habit of young unernployed men of spending the rnajority of their time leaning against walls). The FIS (Front islamiaue du salut), while banned in Aigeria, began to promote its cause abroad. At this point, some of its elements began to accept violence as a valid part of the struggie, and with this acceptance came the unification of the FIS, Afghan vets and the MIA. The GIA was defined by its hndamental rejection of democracy and use of terror as a rneans to bring about poiitical change: "Throat-siitting and murder until the power is God's" (qtd. in Wiilis 285). Its fust targets were junior government ministers, and then later it began to target writers, journaiists and those involved in the media: "Our jihad consisr of Wng and dispersing aii those who Gght against God and his Prophct . . . . The journalists who fight against Islamism through the pen will perish by the sword" (qtd. in Wiis 285). The first victim of this fatwa was Tahar Djaout (poet and journaiist) killed by gunmen in May, 1993 in the driveway of his house while his young daughter looked on. 52 ifs defining Ieature. He writes, "the modem elegy resembles not so much a suture as 'an open wound' in Freud's disturbing trope for melancholia" (4). Ramazani has coined the term
"melanchoiic mouming," which he opposes to "normal mouming" (29). Normal mourning is, in fact healthy mourning in the Freudian sense, whereby one overcomes the loss of the loved object. Ramazani's melancholic mourning, however, is the kind of mourning that we see both in his chosen modern elegies (which include works by Sylvia Plath, Thomas Hardy, and
Seamus Heaney) and, indeed, in hiaDjebar's Le blanc de I'Al~Crie.Melancholic mourning is unresolved, violent and ambivalent. Djebar, herself, suggests that it is the mourner who grieves a violent death who cannot, and indced, should not seek consolation.
In a chapter entitled "La mort inachevée" ("The Unfinished Death") Djebar contrasts the differences in mourning "une mort blanche et l'autre" 'a white death and the other kind'
(95), the other kind being one that is accidental, or even worse, a murdçr:
La mort est-eiie inachevée, parce que violente, parce que survenue sans s'être
annoncée? [. . .] La mort qu'on attend, qui chevauche les jours, celle des
longues cérémonies autour de l'agonisant [. . .]. Une telle mort glisse, comme
une plie luisante, dans Ia rivière de notre mémoire. Tandis que celle qui
survient avec fracas et dans le sang dégorgé, elle bouscule, elle viole notre
durée, elle nous laisse pantelants. (96)
1s a death unfinished because it's violent, because it arrived without
announcing itself! [. ..] A death that we are expecting, one that spans over 53 days, and entaifs long ceremonies surrounding the dying one [. . -1. This kind
of death slips into the river of our memory like a shiny, tlat fish. Whereas the
one that arrives in an uproar and in disgorged blood, it knocks us around,
violates our sense of time and leaves us quivering.
"Trois journées blanches. Deux en juin 93, la troisième en mars 94" 'Three white days. Two in June 93, the third in March 94' (59); we have already scen white as the colour of normalcy in the distinction between the white of an expected death versus the violent unexpected one.
Here, again, whitenrss is the colour of the normalization of mernories that should never be normal. ln Islam, white is the colour of mourning, and thus the iext's white days are the days of the funerals, days of ceremony and ritual. This whitencss of oblivion is the white dust which makes the Ioved one's death, and indeed lhc loved one himwlf, seem farther and hrther away, a fog, which cauterizes and dulls mernories, making them seem unreal. Djebar is careful to point out that she is never present at her Criends' funerals. By refùsing to participate in rituals that serve to shape grief - and thus, by clinging to her melancholic mourning - Djebar attempts to keep the memory of hcr fricnds alivc and her wound open:
"Le passé recule, dit-on: trois morts, ou trois cents morts, ou trois mille . . . Non. Le blanc inaltérable de votre présence. Non; je dis non à toutes les cérémonies: ceiles de l'adieu, celles de la piété, celles du chagrin qui quête sa propre douceur, celles de la consolation" 'They say that the past reireats: three dead, or three hundred dead, or three ihousand . . . No. The unalterable white of your presence. No; 1 say no to ail ceremonies: those of farewell, those of piety, those of sorrow seeking ils own sweemess, those of consolation' (61). She wntes her 54 tiiends' deaths in order to write against the anonymous headlines that we - her readers in
Canada, in France or the United States - occasionally have corne across buried away in the middle of the first section of the newspaper or magazine. Headlines that read "Algerians flee growing wave of violence," "lournalists shot, beheaded in Algeria" and "The distant voices of France (Algerian writers run risks writing in French)." In writing the deaths of her friends,
Djebar individualizes their tragedies in an atternpt to prevent [hem from dissolving into the statistics of a far away place,
The second half of the book is what Djebar calls a procession of Aigerian writers who lived in constant proximity to death. Thus, the text here changes €rom a deeply personal anti- elegy to a lament for the death ofwriting in Ngeria. One by one, Djebar writes the deaths of fifteen Aigerian writers, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Kateb Yacine and Tahar
Djaout. Some died of illness, some accidentally, and others, rnost recently, were assassinated by fellow Algerians. While ihc first part of the book is a refusal to let go of the dçad, it is clear in this section that these writers are long gone and irretrievable. The procession is a lament for lost leaders: for Camus, who was the first to expcrience the colonial war as a civil one, for Fanon who saw the violence coming and who, more than anyone else would have been ready to take out his scalpel of lucidity (123).
In Le temm retrouvé, Proust likens the book to a cernetery, "un grand cimetière où sur la plupart des tombes on ne peut pIus lire les noms effacés" (189-90) 'a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read' (III,
940). Djebar's Le blanc de 1'Alnérie is indeed a cemetery, in which, for the time being, she 55 herself tends to the graves, making sure the names of the deceased are legible and laying flowers (words) by the headstones. "[Clhaque langue, je le sais, entasse dans le noir ses cimetières, ses poubelles, ses canivaux;" (208) '1 know that every language is a dark repository for piled-up corpses, refuse, sewage' says the narrator of L'amour. la fantasia, "or devant celle de l'ancien conquérant, me voici à éclairer ses chrysanthèmes!" 'but faced with the language of the former conqueror, which offers me its ornaments, its jewels, its flowers, 1
Find they are the flowers of death - chrysanthemums on tombs [!]' (181).
The death of writing that Djebar presents is clearly not merely metaphorical. The presence of death during the 1990s was real, so real that there are few writers (be they journaiists, academics, novelists, poets) left in Ngeria. Many have bcen killed or are in exile.
Each tale in the procession of Le blanc de I'Ai~Erietells the same story again and again, that ola death which is palpable and foreseen, yet somehow unstoppable. The most poignant and horrible example of this is the last death on the list, that of Saïd Mekbel, a journalist at the
Algerian daily newspaper Matin. The evenir,g before his assassination, Mekbel recalled in his journal a conversation that he'd had about his own death? speculating where, how and by whom he would be kiHed. Considering which word would be most effective, he wrote:
««Tuer ou assassiner? Va pour tuer. C'est bref, rapide, un mouvement a deux
temps comme pan-pan. Tandis qu'assassiner ça fait compliqué, ça va chercher
la difficulté, ça appelle le couteau du boucher, plusieurs mouvements chargés
de haine et de cruauté. Alors si on ajoute, de plus, "sauvagement assassiné" ou
ulâchement et sauvagement", non. 56 e.Àla fin du compte, je préfère tuer, ça doit moins faire souffrir.
Assassiner, c'est fait pour le lecteur, pour son imagination. Tuer, c'est fait
pour la victime.>> (253)
"'Kill' or 'assassinate'. Go for kill. [t's short, quick, one movement and one
syllable like the bang of a gun. Whereas [O assassinate sounds complicated,
it'll attract difficulty, it'll cal1 for the butcher's knife and several movements
filled with cruelty and hate. What if we add on 'savagely assassinated' or
'savagely in a cowardly rnanner.' No.
"1 prefer 'kill' aiter all, ii probably causes less suffering. The word
assassinate is for the reader, for his imagination. Ki11 - that's a word for the
victim."
Saïd Mekbel was killed on December 3, 1995. Over forty journaiists had becn killed in the six months leading up to his assassination.
In the absence of writing and witnessing in Algeria of the 1990s, Assia Djebar's text remembers and records a time when things were diiierent, in a last-ditch attempt to resist the white of oblivion. Once again, Proust's narraior of A la recherche du temus ~erducomes to mind, who experiences something akin to Djebar's resisting of whiteness. He too tries to hang on to his pain and grief over his grandmother's death, but in vain, because oblivion comes regardless:
Dans ma crainte que le plaisir trouvé [. ..] n'affaiblit en moi le souvenir de ma 57 grand-mère, je cherchais de le raviver en pensant à telle grande souffrance
morale qu'elle avait eue; à mon appel cette souffrance essayait de se
construire dans mon coeur elle y élançait ses piliers immenses; mais mon
coeur sans doute était trop petit pour elle [. . .]. [Mlon chagrin de la mort de
ma grand-mère diminuait [. . .].(Sodome et Gomorrhe 267)
In my fear lest the pleasure 1 found [. . .] might weaken my memory of' my
grandmother, 1 sought to revive i! by thinking of some great sorrow that she
had experienced; in response to my appeal that sorrow tried to reconstruct
itself in my heart, threw up vast pillars there; but my heart was doubtless too
small for it, 1 had not the strength to bear so great a pain [. . .).[M]y grief for
my grandrnother's death was dirninishing [. . -1. (11,810)
Djebar too, despite her efforts to keep her wound open, cannot prevent it from healing - not even for the duration of her text: "Je ris déjà. Je pleure aussi, aussitôt aprk, troublée de constater que le rire revient. Mais quoi, je guéris! A ma manière, j'oublie" 'I'm laughing already. I cry too, right afterwards, troubled to discover that laughter is retuming. So there it is, I'm healing. I'm forgetting in rny own way' (163).
I have pointed to the significance of the colour white as the colour of mouming in
Islam, and to its significance in Djebar's textual world as the colour of oblivion (the French expression "avoir un blanc" 'to have a white' is the equivalent of the English 'to go blonk').
White is, of course, also the colour of the colon. The white of Algeria is the European 58 colonizer of Algeria, and it is this association that disturbs the logic of the colour white as it is set up in the text. The white of Algeria has a duty underbelly that complicates things and that cannot be ignored. If the language of neutrality here is the language of the colonizer, then, in speaking this 'neutral' language, Djebar and her friends effectively "speak white."
Speaking white for Djebar and her friends is not a racial category, rather it is a class distinction. In speaking white, they step into the upper classes of the Ngerian francophone intelligentsia, thus leaving the complications of their 'truc' origins behind. Michèle Lalonde's poem "Speak White" speaks to a similar class divide that she saw in Québec of the 1960s and
'70s. This class divide, too, manifests itself in a linguistic contlict:
speak white
il est si beau de vous entendre
parler de Paradise Lost
ou du profil gracieux et anonyme qui tremble
dans les sonnets de Shakespeare [...... -1
ah!
speak white
big deal
mais pour vous dire
l'éternité d'un jour de grève
pour raconter une vie de peuple-concièrge mais pour rentrer chez nous le soir
à l'heure où le soleil s'en vient crever au-dessus des ruelles mais pour vous dire oui que le soleil se couche oui chaque jour de nos vies â l'est de vos empires rien ne vaut une langue à jurons notre parlure pas très propre tachée de cambouis et d'huile (24-28)
Speak white it is so lovely to listen to you speaking of Paradise Lost or the anonymous, graceiul profide trembling in the sonnets of Shakespeare [...... ,.....I
Ah speak white big deal but for teiüng about the eternity of a day on strike for telling the whoIe life-story of a nation of caretakers for coming back home in the evening at the hour when the sun's gone bust in the alleys
for telling you yes the Sun does set yes
every day of our lives to the east of your empires
Nothing's as good as a language of oaths
our mode of expression none too clean
dirtied with oil and with axlegrease (25-29)
Language and class are inscparable in this poem. English is cquated with wealth, power and oppression, while Québécois is the language of a people of doormen and bellboys. Here the language of Québec is a grubby language, oil-stained and compriscd of profanities. But only this language, the language of stutterers ("nous sommes un peuple inculte et bègue" [241 'wc are a rude and stammenng people' [25]) the poet tells us, can express what it is to exist in the underclasses of Québec. This poem shows us the other side of what it can mean to speak white.
Lalonde's poem appeared in 1970. A mernorable performance of ii was filmed in
March of that year at the Université du Québec à Montréal's Nuit de la ooésie (Night of
Poetry) when Lalonde's recitation of "Speak White" brought the evening of sornetirnes silly, occasionally inebriated, and oiten blatantly nationalist poetry to a close. Interestingly, this text too is notable in its temporal proximity to political violence and terrorism. The 1960s in
Montreal were punctuated by over 200 bombing attempts airned at anglophone establishments, including McGill University, the Montreai Stock Exchange and parts of
Westrnount, an upper-middle-class suburb. La Nuit de la poésie took place seven months 6 1 before the October Crisis (the kidnapping of the British trade commissioner in Montreal,
James Cross, and the murder of the minister of labour and immigration Pierre Laporte, whose
body was found in the trunk of a car on October 17, 1970). The October Crisis resulted in the
suspension of civil libertics in Québec, and in the imprisonment of hundreds of innocent
Quebeckers thtough the invocation of Canada's War Measures Act. The FLQ (Front de la
Libération du Ouébec 'Québec Liberation Front') was disbanded and in early December,
1970 the ce11 holding James Cross was discovered by police, and his release was negotiated
in return for safe passage to Cuba for the kidnappers and their family members.
The connection, and even comparison, between Québec and Algeria is inviiçd in
Lalonde's poem:
Speak white
tell us again about Freedom and Democracy
Nous savons que la liberte est un mot noir
comme la midre est nègre
et comme le sang se mêle à la poussière
des rues d'Alger ou de Little Rock (28)
Speak white
tell us again about freedom and democracy
We know that liberty is a Black word
as misery is Black as blood is muddied with the dut of Algiers or of Little Rock (29) it is a startling comparison, knowing what we know now.
Algeria declared independence in 1962, and the FLN came to power. In 1963, very much inspired by events in Algeria, the FLQ was founded. Both the FLN and FLQ were socialist revolutionary movements which accepted violence as a means to the goal of independence. And in both cases, language was a central part of this struggle. Also in both cases the colonizer's language was the only vehicle to economic, political and social success: it was in Lalonde's words a language of "production proiits et pourcentages" (38)
'production profits and percentages' (26), "pour embaucher / donner des ordres / fixer I'hrure de la mort à l'ouvrage" (38) 'for hiring and firing / for giving the orders / for fixing the hour to be worked to death' (27), and the struggle was to elevate the language of the underclass to a position of influence. In Algeria, this process was undertaken in the form of "Arabisation," while in Québec this took the form of Bill 101, which legislated the use of French in commerce. This is the iamous French-only signs law, which gave birth to the so-called
'language police,' often francophone students employed by the QuEbec provincial government to search for violators of the law. It also took the form of changes to education laws in 1974 whereby irancophone and aiiophone children would be obligated to attend
French language schools. We know that "Arabisation" left an entire generation of unemployable young men in its wake, and that this dissatisfaction and idleness have contributed to the recent violence in Algeria and to a deepening of a class-conflict that is defined most visibly by language. In Québec, the process of elevating the Québécois 63 language has arguably been more successful, and certainly less violent. The whiteness of
Lalonde's poem and that of Djebar's text are in the end irreconcilable. Both are inseparable from their political contexts and from their times. Lalonde's poçm communicates the cry for justice of the underclass, while Djebar's text laments the fate of the besieged upper class.
Code-switching in Lalonde's poem is provocative, and anything but neutralizing.
Raiher, her poem is steeped in bitter irony; her use of English is biting and accusatory.
Language stutters here too, but it is a stuttering of a generation that rnust appeal br its words to be heard as weli as the breaks in-between. It is an appeal to bc allowçd to speak something other than white, a rejection of the universal, of the neutral, in tavour of something specific, local, even parochial. Lalonde's poem illustratcs a differcnt kind of stuttrring and a dilferent kind of minor writing, and it problematizes the notion of what it rneans to speak white.
Juxtaposing these two texts in this way raises several issues. The first is that of the neutrality that Djebac ciaims for her language of expression: is framing the writer's relationship to language in this way simply a means of opting out of, of not dealing with
Linguistic conflict? 1s simply denying the political baggagc: of language in the way that
Djebar seems to want to do in Le blanc de I'Abérie a cop-out, or is it a revolutionary (post- post-colonial) relationship to language? In othec words, what is at stake in choosing the option of literary globalism, which is where this kind deterritocialization seems to be leading us? Lalonde's poem and Djebar's text offer us two models for thinking about minor iiterature: while Lalonde's poem stages the Balkanization (a kind of reterritorialization) of language (her poem makes me wonder what kind of texts the hittistes - the young unemployed men who hang out against the walls of the Casbah -of Aigiers would write),
Djebar's text is an attempt at deterritorialization, at coming up with a new mode1 of post- post-colonial writing," and at the creation of a minor literature that is the writing of the future. This is not to Say that Djebar's text is unreflective and that there is a lack of awareness as to the bloody heritage of her language of expression. The struggle between the two faces of language: thac of oppressor and that of liberator is central to her work. The fratricide in
Algeria of the 1990s, however, has complicated the relationship between writer and language even more. We know that no language is really and truly neutral, and 1 suspect that Assia
Djebar may in fact know this better than most. Le blanc de l'Algérie is a text written in a hurry, in one go, as a result of a pressing need for her to react to the bloody events of her homeland, and it is al1 the more interesting for the sense of urgency that it conveys. The issue here is that it is no longer, and perhaps has never been, sufficient to speak merely in terms of
IL In his discussion of Abdelkébir Khatibi's novel Amour bilin~ue(Bilingual Love) (in "Traduire ou <
Deterritorializaîion: The Rhizome and the Archive
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed maiters,
and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to
overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to
fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in
ail things, there are lines of articulation or segrnentary, strata and territories;
but also lines of flight, movements of deten-itorialization and destratification [.
. .].IA book] is a multiplicity [. . .].(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
PIateaus 3-4)
Toward a Minor Liierature: The Case of the Litvaks
The Litvak authors Icchokas Meras and Markas Zingeris belong [O separate generations: Meras was bom in 1934 and Zingeris in 1947, several years after the
Kovno/Kaunas ghetto had been liquidated. Meras, who emigrated IO Israel in 1972, visited
Lithuania in 1996, which is when these two writers met for coffee in Kaunas, Zingeris's hometown. Zingeris described their encounter in the publication Siaures Atenai (Athens of the North):
Susitikome viename Kauno Senamieslio viesbutyje. Persimet~sper peti
Sa&, jis guviai gestikuliavo ir tu9tino vienq kavos puodefi po kito. Niekad
nepasakytum, kad Sis imogus yra i3gyvengs epochg, kad Icchokui Merui 64.
66 Ko gero, tai ne amiiaus, O stiliaus savybt' - jo aprnqstymai niekados nera kategoriski, jie niekados nera iS anksto jiodinti ar paruoLti. JO Snekamojoje kalboje daug visokiq "galbüt", "aS neiinau", "tikriausiai". Fikalbejcs jis dainai stabteli ir sustemba: "Tai apie mes Snekejomès? Aha!" Ir asociacijq takeliais grjita prie ibities taiko [. . .J.
Su Icchoku Meru mus sieja keistos giminystes ryiiai. JauCiau, bet nespejau jam to pasakyti. Pagalvojus, tai lemtis, kurios vardas lietuviq kalba.
Skamba kiek patetifikai, betgi, kad ir kaip pasisuksi, mudu priklausome paradoksaliq iydy kategorijai ir paradoksaliqjv radytojy. (Zingeris, "Vilnius -
Tel Avivas - Vilnius" 2,9).
We met in a hotel in the old town of Kaunas. A scarf thrown over one shoulder, he gesticulated vigorously and empticd one cup of coffee after anoiher. You'd never think that this person has expericnced an epoch, that
Icchokas Meras is 64 years old. It's probably a characteristic of style, rather than age - his thoughts are never categorical, they are never formulated or prepared in advance. In his spoken language there are al1 kinds of "maybes,"
"1 don't knows," and "probablys." Carricd away by the conversation, he often pauses and asks: "So what were we talking about? Oh yes! And via a path of associations, he returns to the original starting point [. . .].
1 felt that strange blood ties linked Icchokas Meras and myself, but 1 didn't have the time to tell him this. In retrospect 1 see that that tie is caiied the 68
Lithuanian language. It sounds pathetic, but however you look at it, the two of
us belong to a category of paradoxical Jews, and of paradoxical writers.
It is the paradox of a Litvak writing in Lithuanian (and the way in which one negotiates this paradox) that interests me in the cornparison of the work of these two authors. Meras and
Zingeris occupy a linguistic position that is uniquely post-Shoah. Both wrire of a los[ comrnunity in a language that is not of that community, and in doing so, each treads a very fine line between two communities - the Litvak and the Lithuanian - who, in a timr of madness, more often than not found thernselves in opposite camps. The rcsult of thcir negotiation is a dance bçtween the present and the past, between shadows and people, and between two often mutually exclusive communal mernories characterizcd by pain. ln thc previous chapter 1 discussed Deleuze and Guattari's definition of a minor literaiure, which, in their words, "doesn't corne frorn a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language" (16). 1 now propose to modify this definition slightly and to speak of minority writing in a language of relative political power, rather than in a major language. 1 do this to avoid discussions of what constituies a major language and whether or not is possible to consider Lithuanian as such. Minor literature, in my view, is not defined by the 'importance,' whether historical or literary, of 'its' language of expression, rather it is defined by a writer's sirnultaneous being inside and outside a language. Derrida's proposition: "1) We only ever speak one language. 2) We never only speak one lsnguage"
(Monolinnualism 7) cornes to mind here. Minor writers always write 'in' one language and
'out' of another: Djebar mites 'in' French, but 'out' of Arabic and Berber; Meras and
Zingeris write 'in' Lithuanian, but 'out' of Yiddish. It is a question of relative power, rather 69 than of recognized importance. 1 therefore propose to consider Lithuanian as a language of
relative political power when compared to the current (and historical) position of Yiddish, which is on the verge of disappearing from Lithuania altogether. Indeed, Lithuania's Litvak
community itself is in danger of disappearing altogether, language or no language. The
warning is sounded in the novel Aulink fontana arba Maiasis Parviius (Around the Fountain
or Little Paris) by Zingeris's narrator as he tells the story of his father's funeral, when the
deceased must be buried standing because there is no more room in the Jewish cemetery: he
tells this story as the very last Jew of Kovno/Kaunas.
Zingeris and Meras, we will see, exccute their dances very differently. While
Zingeris's dance involves gyration, vibration, the mixing of influences, and the piling on OC
laycr upon layer, Meras's dance is characterized by removal, by a paring down, a kind of
striptease that eventually reveals a clean, uncomplicated core.' Meras's novel Lveiosios
trunka akimirka (Stalemate) (which originally appeared in 1968, then again in 1998) is
structured around a fateful game of chess in which the young narrator, Izia (Izaokas),' must
play against the Vilna ghetto commandant. The boy must force a stalemate in the game in
order to Save himself and the rest of the ghetto children. Zingeris's 1998 novel, Aolink
fontana arba Maiasis Parynus (Around the Fountain or Little Paris), spans close to 80 years,
kginning with World War 1 and ending sometime after Independence in 1990. It tells the
story of a waiied community, portraying the inhabitants of a Kaunas courtyard at the centre
' Here the nitle of Meras's 1976 novel Striptizas (Striptease) cornes to mind and resonates with all kinds of possibilities, but this is not the text that interests me here.
Izia is caiied 'Isia' (from Isaac) in the English translation of the novel, Siaiemate. of which, of course, stands a fountain. The novel is narrated by a young Jewish boy who grows up in this courtyard and watches his neighbours disappear, commit suicide, succumb to discase, and be hauled off to unknown destinations by the Soviet authorities.
To be detemtorialized, Deleuze and Guattari tell us means becoming a nomad in one's own language (Kafka 25; A Thousand Plateaus 53-54), and being a linguistic nomad
means bumping up against other languages. There is something special that happens to
Eoreign language learners: necessity makes them poets. One is always re-inventing a language
when one is new to it: bending it, stretching its limits, coining phrases, and exploiting trans-
linguistic puns. Minor writers are ablebto sustain this dynamic relationship to their Ianguage
of expression, and Zingeris is an exemplary case. Mc infuses his text with Russian, Polish,
and French phrases, rhyrnes and fragments, and with characiers who speak Lithuanian with a
Yiddish accent. Some of these fragments are translated in footnotes; others (like a rude Polish
rhyme that the narrator pretends to be too prudish to translate3) are not, and thus potentiatly
"Su Valdiios namais PtaSinskas turejo reikalv keturiasdeSimtaisiais, ui platinimq Menapolyje lenki) kupletq, po Molotovo-Rybentropo pakto (tia tavo uirafiams, Skaitytojau) tapusio perdem populiaru:
Tancv tancy dwa zarancv. iedin ~ierdzi, druei smierdzi.
Tai viso labo tik neSvankus kupletas, ir a3 tau jo neversiu. Cia tai, kq anglai vadina ianpagg. Tatiau istorijos iSmatose kartais daugiau tiesos negu akademijv analuose."
'In the forties PtaSinskas had dealings with the State house for the dissemination of a Polish couplet in Menapolis, which became very popular for a long time following the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact (this is for your notes, Reader): become pure sound, emptied of meaning. Other phrases, most notably, at least to this reader, the French ones, are riddled with spelling errors (like "coutourere" [45] for example, and
"e~aterles bour~eous[103]) and misgendered nouns ("C'est une Manifeste!" (611)' producing bisexual bagrnents like "Bonne voyage" (IO), in which a feminine adjective is coupled with a masculine noun. It would be easy simply to say that Zingeris's French is just plain bad, and a smug reader may in fact be tempted to go through the text with a red pen circling and correcting such errors. But here, too, Ianguage stutters. It vibrates with new possibilities: the "error," 'Bonne voyage,' becomes a pun. The adjective bonne 'good' becomes the noun bonne meaning 'maid' and the phrase banne vovape becomes a distorted
'maiden voyage,' a phrase which resonates with possibility in a book that is al1 about disappearance and departures. While this particular instance of stuttering language is arrived at through a back gate, in other places, the narrator himself points to the possibility of
Dancine. dancinp are two shitheads, the one farts, the second stinks.
At best, this is just a vulgar couplet, and 1 won't translate it for you. This is what the English cal1 dirtv lannuape. However, sometimes there is more truth in the refuse of history than in academic annalsy (Aalink fontau 140-41).
The couplet is in Goral, a Polish Highlander dialect. Characteristically, Zingeris's couplet contains a speIling mistake: the "zarancy" of the rhyme should in fact rcad "zasrancy." 1 thank George Gasyna, who provided me with the translation of the rhyrne and flagged the speiiing error. He adds the foiiowing gloss on the rude couplet: "This would usually be Sung, in one of these sentimental 'vioiinish,' parodic rhyming Goral songs that regularly astonish the vacationing folk with their unapologetic, bawdy rudeness. . . ." 72 emptying words of their original meanings and filling them with new significance. Initially the most striking layering or 'piling up effect' that the reader hdsin the novel is the many names that are used to designate the city in which the story takes place: Mena~olis.'/ Laikinoii
Sostinè 'The Temporary Capital's / Maiasis ParvZius ' Little Paris' / Kaunas (as the
Lithuanians call it) / Kovno (as the Jews and Russians call it) 1 Kauen as the Germans call it.
Here the narrator riffs on the meaning of the German word kauen, foiiowing a line of associations to a point where the text bubbles with (rueful) laughter:
Dalykas tas, kad Jis miestas turi ivairiq pavadinimb nelygu kaip iji paiiürksi.
Tarkime, KAUEN Si mies& pavadino pra-iygiuodarni vokieeiai kareiviai.
KAUEN vokiSkai reikrih kramtyti ir, gahas daiktas, jie ir su9veite, iygio
qlygomis, Çia vienq kitq surnuihi, O jy frldfebeliai tai gal ir po bifStekq su
krauju. Tatiau patys miesticciai niekad Sitaip miesto nevadindavo, jiems jis
visada buvo Menapolis, amiinoji jq laikino gyvenimo sostine. (A~linkfontanq
12)
The thing is that this city has ail kinds of narnes, depending on how you look
at it. Let's Say German soldiers named this city KAUEN as they marched
through it. In German, KAUEN means to chew and, it's possible, that one
Some possible etymologies for "Menapolis" are: "menas" ('art' - Lithuanian); "menshe" ('less' - Russian): "menis" ('anger' - Greek). Kaunas was the temporary capital of Lithuania during the interwar period, when the Vilnius region was under Polish rule. 73
day, they scarfed down a sandwich or two as they marched on through, and
perhaps at the same time their field officers each had a bloody steak. But the
city residents themselves never referred to their town in this way, to them it
was always Menapolis, the eternal capital of their temporary lives.
We can contrast the layering of names ont0 the city of Kaunas in Lingeris's Aplink fontanq with the emphatically un-named Vilnius in Meras's novel ueiosios trunka akirnirkq
(Stalemate). Only two place names situate the ghetto geographically: Paneriai (Ponar), the killing fields just outside of Vilnius; and the Hi11 of Three Crosses (Triiu Krviiu Kalnas). To anyone who knows the history of the Vilna ghetto, certain figures are easily recognizablç and the setting could only be Vilnius. For example, the fictional Sogcris (Schoger) is a composite of the historical Mürer and Gens (the German officcr and the Head of the Jewish Police who were in charge of the ghetto). Gens, who was Jewish, negotiated with Mürer in terms of how many ghetto inhabitants would be handed over at any given time. Mürer was a gentile and lived outside the ghetto walls. He controIled the hated ghetto gate (Arad 89). Sogeris in
Lv~iosiostrunka akimirb is a non-Jewish authority insidc the ghetto, and in this way encompasses the historical roles of both Mürer and Gens. Another example of easily recognizable historical equivalents in the novel is the fictional Mitenberg who stands in for the historical Witenberg (a Jewish partisan who surrendered, once the threat was issued that unless he did so, the entire ghetto would be destroyed) (Arad 387-95). Despite this specificity of time and place, Meras's text's production has been characterized by a process of constant cleaning out, paring down and simplification. This can already be seen in his 1963 typescript which seems to indicate that the author considered removing the reference to the Hill of Three Crosses alt~gether.~The removal of almost al1 time and place markers, as well as the eventual removal of political markers, makes for a novel that could take place almost
anytime, almost anywhere. It makes for a novel which, instead of being about the tragedy of
Vilna's Jewish community, could be read as an adolescent love story.
Meras's Lv~iosiostrunka akimirkq appeared in Soviet Lithuania in 1968, and was re-
published in independent Lithuania in 1998 along with two other short novels. Interestingly,
in its Iatest appearance, the novel has been edited and soine small but significant changes
have been made to the text. These changes, for the most part, consist of the removal of
"Sovietalia,"or conspicuously laudatory Soviet references. References, for example, to the
approaching Red Army, for which the prisoners of the ghetto, as we know from memoirs and
diaries, listened at night as they waited for liberation, have been removed. Also removcd or
changed are certain references to Lithuanian collaborators. For example, the word
"baitaraiSiiiaiW(the word means "white arm bands," and refers to young thugs who
coilaborated with ihe German oc~upiers)~has been changed to "policininkai" (police officers)
(1968: 113).' There is no introduction to the texts indicating that these texts have been
Two different sets of hands have edited this typescript. Meras's hand appcars to be the one in pend, as his signature is in pencil at the end of the script. The second hand is in green ink, and does not appear to be the same handwriting (it is much smaller and tighter than the other handwriting). In pend the phrase "triji) kryiiy kaln4 mateme" ("we saw the hi11 of three crosses") is underlined in pend with a question mark in the rnargin. It is possible chat the author conternplated removing this phrase. (Lv~iosios,1963:120)
See Dr. Dwonwecki's testimony in Arad (67) on the "ha~unes"(Yiddish for abductors) who kidnapped Jewish men in the streets of Vilna in July of 1941, prior to ghettoization. These abductors wore white ambands.
1 cefer to each of the three versions of Lv~iosiosby year: 1963 refers to the archiva1 typescript, 1968 refers to the first published version of the novel (under the Soviets), and changed in any way since their original appearance in the 1960s, only a tiny note that accompanies the copyright material on the very last page of the book.
It is, of course, possible to read the removal of Soviet references from the text as a removal of what Tomas Venclova has called "lightning rods" (a formulation he attributes to
Chukovsky ["Game" 3S]), passages that were put into texts as sweetmeats for the censors, and which readers of the day would have recognized as such and simply ignored. Mowever, the removal of the word "baltaraiiXiai" (white arm bands) requires, 1 believe, a more nuanced reading. It is here that we see Meras's dance very clearly. In stripping his text of all complicating factors, of textual fragments that may prove unpalatable to a past-Soviet
Lithuanian audience (the Red Army, the "baltaraiSCiai," among others), Meras dances with two partners, or perhaps for two spectators, if indeed we want to think of his dance as a striptease, and he tries to please [hem both. Meras is caught between two collectives, two communities. As he changes his text in order to facilitate his movernent beiween the two communities, his minor text is slowly becoming a major one. With each edit, it is slowly reterritoriaiized and increasingly at home in the contemporary Lithuanian sphere. Meras's text is quickly becoming an increasingly cramped space which can no longer hold al1 the words it once did. And as the walls of the text close in, words deemed superfluous,
1998 refers to the most recent publication of the text in a collection calîed Trvs romanai (Three Novels). Whenever two sets of page references are given (i.e. 1968: 17-26; 18-27), the first set of page numbers refers to one of the three Lithuanian versions, and the second refers to the corresponding passage in Jonas Zdanys's 1980 translation of Lvniosios entitIed Stalemate. In general, 1 use the 1968 version of ly~iosiosas my standard reference point against which to compare other versions. This is the version that provided the basis for Zdanys's translation. 76 undesirable, uniashionable, and potentiaiiy upsetting (words like "baltaraih5ai") get pushed out the ghetto gates.
Cramped spaces, it seems, require that their inhabitants make a decision and take a stand: are you in or out? Those that aren't in must go. The result is a text characterized by departures and removals, either of neighbours, friends, and family members, or of words, phrases, and big chunks of text. The cramped extra-textual space of rninor literature - that is, the space of the writers' community - is no less direct in its interrogation of its rnembers' adherence. Are you in or out? Meras, we know, did leave Lithuania for Isracl in 1972, and while Zingeris's narrator JoSkis Ieaves little Paris in Lithuania for big Paris in France,
Zingeris himself has chosen to stay. His decision to remain, however, may in tact tell us more about the cramped space of exile, than about his being at home in Lithuania. The following is what Zingeris has to Say about his decision to stay in Lithuania, rather than emigrate to Israel
(1 trust the reader will recognize the Isracli writer to whom he makes reierence). "Now, about persona1 features:" Zingeris writes:
1, as a Litvak, stüi understand Yiddish and 1 still ieel deep feelings towards
Jewish history and to the state of Israel. But 1 consider Lithuanian my native
language and my role in society as that of a Lithuanian writer. That is why 1
have chosen to stay in Lithuania. (Yes, there is another Lithuanian Jew, or
Jewish Lithuanian, cdit as you may, who is the only Israeli writer writing
fiction in Lithuanian, which itself sounds like fiction in Israel, 1 suppose. But
it seems he wouldn't like another Lithuanian writer to come and stay in Israel,
as ha may lose some of his aaractive exoticism). ("fewish Identity" 195) 77
Meras is always other. Emphatically deterritorialized, he is a Lithuanian never quite at home in Israel, and a Jew never quite at home in Lithuania.
The Ghetto as Deterritorialized Space
In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari describe Gregor Samsa's transformation into a beetle as a deterritorializing move (14). Through his beçoming-animal, they tell us, Samsa moves toward "an absolute detemtorialization" (59). This kind of deterritorialization dilfcrs tiom the deterritorialization of language that happens through stuttering. It is a physical deterritorialization, a becoming-other, becoming-cut-off and imprisoned, which adds the question of perspective (or focalization) to that of minor literature. Rather than a move away from and outside temtory, as 1 pointed to in Djebar's texts, here it is a movement inwûrd, a interna1 exile.' Gregor Samsa's body is his ghetto.
The Vilna ghetto, like Samsa's insect body, is also a detcrritorialized space. This deterritorialization of the ghetto functions in several important ways for boih those who live
inside its waUs as well as those living outside thcm: the ghetto is sirnultaneously part of the city, while having been erased from its imagined geographical markings. In Nazi-occupied
Vilnius, the inside of the ghetto hardly existed for the outside -a fact which has resulted in
claims that no one (meaning Lithuanians and Poles) really knew about the fate of the Jews in
that city - while the outside, for the most part, remained a memory, a rumour, and a big
unknown for those inside. The Vina ghetto, in this way, was a black hole. Today, the site of
the ghetto has been retemtorialized. Few signs of the Jewish community rernain in the now-
For more on the literature of internai exile, see Daniel Marder's study of nineteenth- century American literature, Exiles at Home. 78 fashionable neighbourhood where hundreds of thousands of Jews were once housed.
It is clear that the ghetto was not hermetically sealed, as on rare occasions individuals were able to exit and enter through one of its many entrances. It, to return to Deleuze and
Guattari's term, was a rhizome, containing "multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations [weren't] very well known" (Kafka 3):
A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from mots and radiclcs.
Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes [. . .].Even some animals are, in their pack
form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in al1 of their functions of shrlter,
supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very
diverse forrns, from ramified surface extension in ail directions to concrction
in bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes
the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 6-7)
The principal characteristics of rhizomes are connection and heterogeneity ("any point of a
rhizome can bç connected to anything other, and must be" [7]); muItiplicity ("Multiplicities
are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization
according to which they change in nature and connect with other rnultiplicities" 191);
asignifying rupture ("A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up
again on one of its old lines, or on new lines [. . .]. There is a rupture in the rhizome
whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of tlight is part of the
rhizome" [9]); cartography (a rhizome acts as a map, "entirely oriented toward an
experimentation in contact with the real [. . .]. The map is open and connectable in al1 of its 79 dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be tom, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social" [12]); and decalc~mania~~("Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up ta the rhizome" [14]).
In Lwiosios, the chess game maps out the deterritorialized space of the novel. Each rnove described in the novel is a new entrance point into the narrative, while each rnove skipped is a route not taken. Diiferent routes or flight lines out of the ghetto are also cxplored ihrough the character, Abraomas Lipmanas, who anchors the novel, as al1 perspectives of the novel are narrated by his offspring. He is the root, or the tree, that the map connects out tu thç rhizome: "A new rhizome may form in the heart of the trce, the hollow of a mot, the crook of a branch (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 15). Each new line of tlight is introduced by Abraomas's (Abraham's) incaniatory ''A3 pagimdiiau dukteri/sÜnq. . ." '1 begat a daughterfson . . .' and each of Abraomas's children embodies a different possible route out (in both the triumphant and most tragic senses) of the ghetto: "We will bc trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and gaIleries one passes through to Link two points, what the rnap of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enters by another point" (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafia 3). The map of the ghetto, therefore, is modified with each line of flight, and Ina is the first of the seven children to leave. She exits first with the help of the Czech guard and then through her death (probably in prison) (1968: 17-26;18-27); Rachile (Rachel) is the victim of medical experiments (1968:
This is the art or process of transferring pictures or designs from speciaily prepared paper to wood, metal, china, glass, etc.; also used for the papa bearing such design. 80
39-47;41-51); Basia has the possibility of becoming a German soldier's mistress (though it is a possibility from which she walks away) (1968:60-66; 65-72); Kasrielis (Kasriel) commits suicide (1968:84-93; 90-100); Riva Gghts wiih the partisans in the countryside (1968: 105-
15; 115-26);Taibalè (Taibale), the youngest, iives as an Aryan with a Lithuanian farnüy in the city (1968: 127-33;140-46); and finally Izia attempts to fiiid a way out through thé chess game. The family stands in for the enlire ghetto. It itself becomes a rhizome, with Abraornas as its point of origin.
Physical departures from the ghetto play an important role in the novel as well. The characters Estera (Esther) and [zia leave the ghetto in search of their friend Janekas (Janck), who has been taken away to be shot at Paneriai (Ponar), but who manages to escape by jumping out the back of the truck. Janekas, a Pole, has come into the ghetto, even though he is not obligated to do so. The character may be seen as the author's rneleaneer:- a twisted mirroring of the writer's own position as a child, hiding behind a false ethnicity and speaking the other's language with a slight accent. We learn early in the novel that Meika, Estera's brother, had been Janekas's best friend, and that it is out of a sense of loyalty to him that
Janekas has followed Estera and her parents into the ghetto. The day that the Jews were
herded into the ghetto, Meika was shot dead when he tried to stop a German from sexually
assaulting his sister. Moments aiter the death of his friend, Janekas came up behind the
German, who was in the process of ripping off Estera's clothes, and he brought down the ax
on the back of the German's head, kihg him. Janekas then made the decision to enter the
ghetto. Wrapping Meika's body in a sheet, he brought the corpse inside its watls with them.
Entering or exiting the ghetto is dways a dangerous proposition. The gate of the ghetto, the principal and only officia1 entry point, is the most perilous spot - in life as in art.
One of the most valuable records of life in the Vilna ghetto is the young Yitschok
Rudashevski's diary. Witten in Yiddish, the text is mosl valuable for its portrait of the daily lives of the ghetto chüdren. In his diary Rudashevski referred to the ghetto entrance as "the hated gate" (62) and reported in shock and disbeliek
People are being beaten at the gate. These words Cal1 from the rnouths of the
panting and desperate workers who, disheveled [sic.] and distracted, walk
from the gate from which a kind of humming, gasping is heard. Mournful
human beings are streaming back and forth, wild cries, the lashing of a knout
is heard . . . . PeopIe are being beaten at the gate. At Murer's1' comrnand
Jewish policemen beai [theml and take away the piece of bread that the simple
worker carries. (99)
Searches routinely took place there, and those found smuggling food or weapons would be
Bogged or worse. Even chitdren were whipped for their transgressions, as Rudashevski's
account of the iate of a young boy in the ghetto attests:
Friday the 1'' of January, 1943
Elke, the son of Khone Rone, lives on Shavler 4 (they lived with us). He slips
" The lack of standard spelIings of the names of people in the Vilna ghetto is a result of the continua1 translation of the ghetto's texts across different alphabets. Most ghetto texts were origindly written in either Yiddish or Russian. With each transliteration of a name from Yiddish or Russian to Lithuanian, French or English its spelling shifts slightly. Mürer's name is often spelled without an umlaut (Murer), as in the above Rudashevski citation, and has even been speiled as 'Mourer' in a French translation of Macha Rolnikas's Je devais le raconter. Similarly, Hennan Knik's fîrst name is someiimes speUed 'kma~,'and Sutzkever's name as 'Sutskever.' I have retained the various speUings in rny citations. 82
out every day and brings in potatoes, flour through a hide-out. The family is a
large one and so the little boy looks for a way to survive. On one of these days
the Jewish police seized him and the srnail, frai1 Elke was given 25 lashes.
Four policemen held him and Levas himself, the commander of the
gatekeeper, beat him so mercilessly, so murderously. The little breadwinner
was brought home badly flogged. (115)
The equivalent of Levas in Meras's novel is Yashka Feler, "BizLinq meistras" (1968: 53)
'Master of the Whip'(58). Young lzia is whipped by him on three occasions for attempting to smuggle flowers into the ghetto for Estera (1968: 52-54; 56-59), who has been wondering aloud to her friend why no flowers are allowed there. The adults in his work group are cross with Izia for putting them at risk, as they are each smuggling in a piece of a firearm, and the boy's extravagance may cause them al1 to be searched. In the end, however, each man in the column smuggles in a single flower for Izia, who is finally able to present his bouquet to
Estera (1968; 56-57; 60-61).
There are four reasons to exit the ghetto: as part of a team that works outside its walls
(Izia is part of slich a work team); to join the partisans in the iorest; to be shot al Paneriai
(Ponar) or imprisoned in LukiSkes (Lukiszki); or to be buried (the Jewish cemetery lies outside the walls of the ghetto). The first three of these crossings of the ghetto boundary bring with [hem an element of danger and a proximity to death. In the fourth case it is, of course, already too late. A corpse enters the ghetto onty once in the novel: Meike's body is
carried in on the day the ghetto is set up. But Janekas, who is so dehydrated that he is barely
aiive and who is carried in by his two fnends after they find him lying outside the ghetto 83 gates, aImost becomes the second. Janekas is taken out of the ghetto to Paneriai just as
Estera, Izia and Janekas are invited 10 form a trio and join the partisans in the iorest. Without
Janekas, there is no trio; and without a trio, there is no joining the resistance, so Izia and
Estera decide to go to look for their friend (1968: 81-82; 88). Abraomas Lipmanas, Izia's father, patriarch and cartographer af the ghetto, ensures a safe exit for the children inside a
German military rmck: "A3 Zinojau, kad tiktai tevas gali mums padeti" '1 knew chat only my father could help us,' says Izia. "Jis iino visokius büdus, kaip ikiti iS geto, niekam namatant. kaip sléptis, kad tavqs niekas nerashj. Viq getq jis fino kaip savo subadytus pirgtus, ir man kartais netgi keista, kad imogus tiek daug gaii iinoti" (1968: 95-96) 'He knows al1 sorts of ways to get out of the ghetto without being seen, how to hide without being found. He knows the entire ghetto as well as he knows his own needk-pricked fingers, and I sometimes find it strange that a man can know so much'(l03). Once they are safely outside the ghetto and have
reached the couniryside, Izia and Buzia visit several houses around Ponar, asking if anybody
has seen their friend. They finally decide to head back once they are told by an old woman
that she saw two people who jumped from a truck and who wcre then shot (1968:lOO; 110-
11). It is upon their re-entrance into the ghetto that they find their fnend Janekas. Supposedly
dead, the weak and wounded, but very much living, Janekas re-enters the ghetto.
The rhizome of the ghetto connects to a network of resistance that is the rhizome of the partisans in the forests. Riva Lipman(aité)12 (Izia7ssister) and Antanas Jankauskas" are part of that partisan rnovement. Partisan structures are rhizomorphous in that they are structured as independent cells. Much tike the GIA in Ngeria, attacking such a ce11 simply causes ir to splinter and reproduce in greater nurnber frorn the leftover fragments. During
Wurld War II, the forests of Lithuania housed numerous CO-operatingand competing partisan groups, including Soviet partisans who were sponsored by the Red Army, the Lithuanian
Forest Brothers, thc Jewish Resistance, and the Polish Armiia krajova whose mission was to
l2 '-aite'is an unmarried feminine surname ending. t have added it here, since Meras has Lithuanianized the name 'Lipman' in the novel by adding '-as.' The name 'Lipmanaite' may be read as an instance of siuttering language, as it embodies the bumping up of two languages and cultures against each other.
I3 We later learn that Jankauskas's brother is a "baltaraiStisw(1 1-12) (a 'white arm band,' meaning he is a volunteer with the occupying German army). The surname is that of a notorious collaborator. See Bitter Leeacy 178. Curiously, this paragraph is missing in Zdanys's English translation. IIis translation of the passage reads: "Antanas turned toward the window. Riva rhought: Why is he so sad again? 1 have to say something to him . . . . What can 1 say to make him happy?" (122). The passage missing from Zdanys7stranslation should rcad as follows: "Antanas turned toward the window. 'It's a eood thinp.- Riva. that vou don't know exactiv who I am.You don't know that not far from here. rinht here in our town. Iives another Derson with shoots ~eo~leat Paneriai. I'm dad that vou don't know. But 1 hate the fact that as we sit here facin~each other. surrounded bv Germans. I'll never see how vou. vour brother and 1 kill my brother. the one with the same last name as me. with our bare hands. 1 know thai vou can't read mv thouphts rbht now. Riva. and I'm etad. but it ~ainsme that vou'll never see what I'm dreamine- about. Anatanas was stili facinn away from her. Riva thought: Why is he so sad again? 1 have to say sornething to him . . . . What can 1 say to make him happy?" (1968: 112: 122). Meras changes his 1998 text slightly in the same place by replacing the phrase "nesioja bal$ raiStr 'wears a white am band' (1968: 112) to "tarnauja vokieCiams" 'works for the Germans' (1998: 99). The change in vocabulary may have been made for youngtx readers who may not know the significance of the white amband, or it may be nad as a softening of vocabulary in order not to offend post-Soviet readers with a term used to condemn Nazi coiiaborators. 85 regain the region of Vilnius (Who) for Poland. The Lithuanian Forest Brothers continued to fight a guerrilla war against the KGB until as laie as 1956. The last partisan emerged only twenty-three years ago (Moore 121). Qeiosios's partisans, Riva and Antanas, are hiding out in a house in the country and find themselves surrounded by Germans. Just before they are kiiled in an ambush, the two are involved in a plan to bring the ghetto children into the forest to join the partisan war:
-Ar mùsiSkiai greitai gales ikiti i miskq'? - paklausé ji.
- Sergejus siiilo pirmiausia iSvesti jaunimq.
- Juk gete jau daug ginklq.
- Vis tiek visy kartu neiSvesi. MiJiq reikia uikariauti. Keliose
ieminese nepartizanausi. Sergejus laukia papildymo iS anapus. Jarne bus
Markas ir Eugenijus. Supranti? Ir gekj juk reikia saugoti. Jiems labai sunku.
Jiems perdaug sunku. Jei bùw Mitenbergas, büty lengviau. (1968: 109)
'Will our people be able to get to the forest quickly?' she asked.
'Serge [Sergei] suggests that the children be brought out first.'
'But there are many weapons in the ghetto already.'
'But still, not everyone will be taken out at the same time. The iorest
has to be conquered. You can't have a partisan movement based in a few mud
huts. Serge [Sergei] is waiting for reinforcements irom the other side. That's
where Mark and Eugene [Evgeniij are. Understand? And of course, the ghetto
has to be protected. It's hard for them. If Mitenberg were there, it would be 86
easier. ' (119)
In the abwe cited passage, 1 have inserted the Russian names 'Sergei,' and 'Evgenii,' which I prefer to the translater's choice of 'Serge,' and 'Eugene,' here, as the Russian quality of the names is an important marker of these partisans. Through their Russian names, we are to understand that they are Soviet, rather than Lithuanian, Polish or Jewish partisans. The names
'Eugenijus' and 'Markas' are cut out of the 1998 version of the text completely, and the name 'Sergejus' is replaced by 'Aba' (1998: 97). While the Russian quality of the names
Eugenijus and Sergejus leads the reader to the conclusion that these partisans are Soviets, the insertion of the name 'Aba' into the 1998 text changes their identity completely. The partisans in the novel's forest are now Jewish, and the historical equivalent to the novel's late-addition of Aba is undoubtedly Abba Kovner, the legendary hero of the ghetto resistance. The appearance of Aba in the novel continues the deSovietizing process that 1 pointed to carlier, but it is a move far tess ambiguous than the other changes in the novel. By inserting Aba, Meras returns the history of the ghetto resistance to the people who lived it.
The novel's ghetto has been preparing for an uprising for some time: arms are dismantled and smuggied into the ghetto by the adults and hidden inside by the children. The
night of the fatehl chess game is supposed to be the night on which the chiidren leave for the
forest in their trios to join the partisans. Although the novel is ambiguous in its ending, we
know that the historical uprising failed. Most of the ghetto residents preferred to take their
chances and travel to concentration camps in Estonia, rather than take part in an amed
uprising. Most lost their lives there. As the ghetto was liquidated, Abba Kovner and his comrades fled through the sewers of Vilna to join their colleagues in the fore~t.~'
Collectivity and Coniinual Becoming
The writing of minor Literature, as 1 pointed out in Chapter One, is a collective endeavour. No writer of minor literature writes alone, and Meras is no exception. Lygiosios trunka akimirb is as much a contribution to the collective project of writing the Vilna ghetto, as it is a product of it:
Art is defined [. . .] as an impersonal process in which the work is composed
somewhat iike a cairn, with Stones carried in by different voyagers and beings
in becoming (rather than ghosts) [devenants ulutot aue revenants1 that may or
may not depend on a single author.
Only a conception such as this can tear art away hmthe personal
process OC memory and the collective ideal of comniemoration. To an
archaeology-art, which penetrates the millennia in order to reach the
immemorial, is opposed a cartography-art built on 'things of forgetting and
places of passage.' The same thing happens when sculpture ceases to be
monumental in order to become hodological: it is not enough to Say that it is a
landscape and that it lays out a place or territory. What it lays out are paths - it
is itself a voyage. (De!euze, Essavs 66)
" Deleuze and Guattari use the image of the burrow as an alternate way of imagining the rhizome. The underground passages of the sewers figure prominently in the oral histories and diaries of the Vilna ghetto resistance and may be considered as yet another rhizomorphous structure. Andrzej Wajda's film Kanal portrays the movement of the Potish resistance through the sewers of Warsaw, and is an interesting text for us here, as much for its setting as for its negotiating contested histories. 88
Meras, therefore, is a stone-carrier. His text is but a part of a much larger cairn that is the collective text of the Vina ghetto. Lvpiosios dialogues with and is directly informed by other stones and their carriers: carriers like fifteen-year-old Yitschok Rudashevski, already cited, and Herman Kruk, whose stones were their diaries written in the ghetto, and like Ona
Simaité, a librarian ai. Vilnius University, whose stones were her letters written both during and after the war (to Meras and some twenty or more other correspondents) which tell of her multiple entrantes into the ghetto. Meras's novel Lvgiosios is only one entrance into the
Vilna ghetto and one atternpt to rnap it.
In addition eo its king a collective project, rninor literature is always in proccss or
continually becoming. Nowhere is this clearer than in Meras's case; here is a writer whose
texts are never finished, who continually edits and re-edits, publishes and re-publishes. Even
the reterritoriatizing impulse of the most recent version of Lveiosios is a deeply minor-
literary one, as it is steeped in a much stronger impulse to continually become that is
characteristic of the rhizomorphous writing practices of minor literature. Reterritorialization
and deterritorialization always go hand in hand, as minor literature is produced in the space in
between and as a result of the tension beween these IWO impulses: "Deterritorialization must
be thought of as a perfectly positive power that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is
always relative, and has reterritorialization as its flipside or complement" (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 54). Thus, minor literature is always in a continua1 state of
movement (or mouvance, to use Paul Zumthor's terni [47]). This continual flow, this "bonne
vovas" both within the text and between texts, is a defining characteristic of minor
literature: it is the originary gesture of deterritorialization, a striking out beyond the 89 boundaries, a journey of discovery that is always a rnaiden voyage.
1 would like to now look at three aspects of minor literature that 1 have highlighted: its collective nature, its continual flow or becaming, and its multiplicity. Lct us consider the whole of the literary-historicai archive (tcxts both oral and written, fictional and non- fictional) of the Vilna ghetto as a cairn. Each Stone in the cairn is carried by a different individual who adds his or her narrative to the pile. I have already pointed to the fact that
Meras's text dialogues with other 'true' historical tcxis, and rhat certain historical tigures and details are easily recognizable in the novel. Whilc painting to sources and decoding the novcl to test its historical accuracy is an endeavour of questionable rnerit, to read the novel as an entry point to a larger assemblage or cairn, of which it is part, rnay prove a uscful approach.
The cairn is an assemblage' and an assemblage establishes connections between multiplicities
(Deleuze and Guattari, A- 23). Rather than opposing fiction to non-fiction
and memoir to history, the assemblage makes connections between life and work, source and
text, history and fiction:
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority [.
. .], on a single page, the sarne sheet: iived evcnts, historical determinations,
concepts, individuals groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of
this type, a broken chah of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and
transformations, always in relation to the outside. (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus 9)
It is precisely this kind of reading, a reading that opens Meras's text out beyond itself and
connects it to a much larger archive, that 1 will now undertake by ioilowing the accelerations 90 and transformations in the story of the death of an opera singer who died for smuggling food into the ghetto.
The Opera Singer
The very first exit of L&osios- is made by Ina Lipman (18), Abraomas's daughter and a famous opera singer. Ina Ieaves the ghetto in order to retrieve a score of La Juive €rom her iriend and feliow opera singer, Marija BIaievska. As she walks dong the streets outside the ghetto, the singer secretly hopes ta be recognized, while at the same time, she is terrified at the prospect:
Viena gatveje aS pirmq karh. Mano geltoni lopai prisiüti prie Svarkelio, O
Svarkelis, igverstas parnuiah i virSq, guli ant mano rankos.
Praejo moteris su vyrifkiu. AIS jq nepaiistu, bet jie atsisuko du kartus ir
net treCiq kart+ Prabégo vaikai. Jie irgi dairesi i rnane. Nejaugi aS dar panaSi i
savo atvaizdus ant aGQ, kuriy jau seniai nebera? (1968: 19)
1 am alone in the Street for the Cirst the. The yellow patches are sewn to my
jacket, lining turned outward, hangs on rny arm.
A man and a woman pass me. i don't know hem, but they turn around
two times, then a third. Children run by. They also stare at me. Can it be that 1
still look like my picture on those playbills, which have long since yellowed
and crurnbled? (20)
When Ina arrives at Macija's apartment, the two wornen have a short visit, Ina collects the
score and leaves to go back to the ghetto. Just More she leaves, Marija gives her a smali bag 91 of dried pas. As Ina approaches the ghetto gate, the kind Czech guardls who let her past the gate on her way out is no longer alone: "Prie vartq, ialia Ceko, stovi Sogeris. Vis del to jis nutykojo" (24) 'Near the gates, next to the Czech, stands Schoger. 1 have been caught' (35).
Before she is arrested by Sageris, Ina manages to tuck the opera score into her jacket and thrusts both items into the amis of a passerby, asking him to pas it on to her understudy. The episode ends with Ina challenging the Czech to do something, to help her in some way. Hc does nothing:
AS piktai pasiiiürejau j ji. Jis suprato ir nenorom nusisuko. Man buvo tniputi
gaila, kad nespejau antrq kartq paklausti jo vardo ir pavardés. Ji panaSi i
lenkifkas, O lenkiSkos . . .
Dar galeciau jums toliau pasakoti. Dar liko maias gabaliukas laiko.
Bet aS nebepasakosiu. Tokios istorijos baigiasi vienodai, ir jos visai
nejdomios. Svarbiausia - tureti savo dubled. (1968: 26)
1 look at him angrily. He understands and unwillingly turns his back. 1 am a
little sad that 1 [did] not ask hirn his name for the second time. It's similar to a
Polish name, and Polish . . .
1 could tell you more. There's still a small chunk of time. But 1 won't.
Such stories always end the same way, and they are never interesting. The
" This is the only reference 1 have ever corne across to the presence of Czech soldiers in the Viaghetto. 1 suspect that Meras invented this detail in the name of the Soviet ideal of druzhba narodov (friendship of the peoples). 92
most important thing is to have an understudy. (27)
This is the last the reader sees of Ina in the novel, and it is clear from later passages that she is killed: Riva later thinks "Nebera Inos, nebèra Rachiles, Basios, Kasrielio - tai mano seserys ir brolis" (111) 'My sisters and my brother - ha, Rachel, Basia, and Kasriel -do not exist' (121). The historical equivalent of Ina was Liuba Levitska. She was indeed a famous opera singer; she held concerts in the ghetto, and was affectionately called "the nightingale of the ghetto" (Simaite, Letter to Marijona cilvinaite, 17 December 1957). The story of
Levitska's death has probably been recountcd hundreds or thousands of tirnes. In addition tci
Meras's account above, 1 have gathered five different acc~unts~~of the opera singer's death.
Each differs slightly, most notably in the details surrounding the precise food item that she was srnuggling into the ghetto on the day that she was imprisoned: the historian Arad writes that Levitska was carrying two pounds of grits; the diarist Kruk that it was simply beans; the young Rudashevski says peas; Rolnikas specifies a kilogram and a hall of pas; and tinally,
Kalish, in her preface to her collection of songs from the Vilna ghetto, designates whatever
the singer was carrying simply as "a srnail bag of food" (8). The interest in these accounts
lies not in pinning down exactly what Levitska was carrying on the day of her arrest; rather,
in the multiplicity that her story has taken on. The telling of Liuba Levitska's arrest has
become a collective endeavour, but the collective story-teüing does not result in a single,
unified monument to her. Rather, the story explodes into a multipücity of contradictory
accounts. The slight variation in each tehgof the story is the stone that each camer brïngs
-- -
l6 See Appendix 1-5 for the full texts of the differing accounts. 93 to the cairn. It is the dilferences, the moments of memory lapses and shifts that make the story of Liuba Levitska's death a text of' minor literature, and not a myth recited by heart. The story of Liuba Levitska is an example of the kind of "cartography-art buill on 'things of forgetting and places of passage'" (Deleuze, Essavs 66) that Deleuze opposes to archaeology- art. The story of Liuba Levistka's death is one told by a thousand voices, with each voice bringing ik own detail. Her story, thecefore, is a multiplicity. The interest lies in the journey
(the various paths down which each of the tellers takes us), not in the destination (whether the opera singer was carrying beans or pcas or grits).
This multiplicity in the details of ghetto stories repeats itself in a multiplicity ol names: the question of naming is always important in minor literatures, and not surprisingly, it plays an important role in the writing of the opera singer's death. Her name is spelied in various ways: "Lyube Levitski" (Rudashevski), "Lyuba Levitska" (Arad), "Liouba
Levitskaïa" (Rolnikas), and sirnply "Liuba" (Kalish). This multiplicity of names is the result
of the writing 'in' and 'out' of languages and the consequeni bumping up of languages
against each other that is ai the heart of minor literature. In Djebar's texts, the problcm
encouniered is namelessness: the fragmented or dismembered subject (as in "La femme en
morceaux") in Djebar's textual world cannoc be named. A cnimbling Algeria, the author tells
us in Vaste est la a ris on, can no longer be named. Here, with the story of the opera singer, we
lind the exact opposite case. She is not, like so many of Djebar's characters, fragmented and
iherefore unnamable. Raiher, this opera singer (or ai least her tater representations) has a 94 proliferation of names.17 She is not fragmented; rather, she is a multiplicity.
What constitutes a cartography-art "based on things of forgetting and places of passage" as opposed to an archaeology-art? Deleuze tells us that a cartography-art lays out passages. It is a voyage: the process of travelling, not the destination. In this context, one text is never a final destination; rather, it is a stepping Stone to another text, and another, and so on. From this perspective it is impossible to read Meras alone. His trxts immcdiately take us beyond themselves into other stories, diaries, letters, songs, and poems. In the sarne way that rninar literature is no longer a single text written by a single author, cartography-art is no longer an aesthetic entity. Rather, it is an journey, a process that leads to an assemblage, a cairn.
The Ghetto as Archive
The meaning of 'archive,' its only meaning, cornes to it from the Greek
arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the
superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded [. . . 1. It is thus, in
this domiciliation. in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling,
this place where they dweii permanently, marks this institutional passage hm
the private to the public. (Derrida, Archive Fever 2)
l7 Ina Lipman, the fictional equivalent of Liuba Levitska in beiosios experiences a similar mutation with her own name in the novel. She remembers seeing posters for her concert in Prague, and rernarks on the spelling of her name: "AtiSos buvo didiiulis, ir raides anibkos, tik jy kaikodel buvo per daug. Jie rai% afiSose: LNNA LIPMANN. Kq gi, jeigu jiems iaip labiau patiko" (1968:lS) 'The playbills were huge and the letters gigantic, although there were too many of them. They had spelied my name out on the posters: iNNA LIPMANN. Weii, so maybe they liked that spelling better' (19). Jacques Derrida's formulation that "archives take place" points to two features of the Vilna ghetto archive: an archive that 'takes place' takes away space - it detemtoriakes; and secondly, an archive that 'takes place' is active, it is something that happens. Libraries are just such active archives: books leave and corne back through flight lines: an especially vivid image here is that of pneumatic systems that literally send books flying through library passages. Old books are used as the basis for the writing of new ones (thus the archive is a site of production), which get added to the library's collection, and so on. As the library's collection grows, it continues to take up more and more space (it takes more place). The
Vilna ghetto library was one such active archive, as a celebration hosted by the Ghetto
Theatre in honour of "the lending of one hundred thousand books by the [. . . ] library" (Vilna
Ghetto Posters plate 8) attests. The Vilna ghetto not only housed archives, but it constructed itself as an archive. In an impulse that seems both full of hope and utterIy hopeless, the ghetto archived itself - iis history, its language," songs, stories and cultural life - with remarkable precision, conscientiousness, and consistency. While adult scholars in the ghetto were very
much concerned with preserving important manuscripts, sacred texts, and documents
uM~ndaythe 2ndof November Today we had a very interesting group meeting with the poet A. Sutskever. He talked to us about poetry, about art in general and about subdivisions of poetry. In our group two important and interesting things were decided. We create the following sections in our iiterary group: Yiddish poetry, and what is most important, a section that is to engage in collecting ghetto folklore. This section interested and attracted me very much. We have already discussed certain details. In the ghetto dozens of sayings, ghetto curses and ghetto blessings are created before our eyes; terms like 'vashenen,' 'smuggling into the ghetto,' even songs, jokes and scories which already sound Iike legends. 1 ieel that 1 shail participate zealously in ihis Little circle, because the ghetto foiklore which is amazingly cultivated in blood, and which is scanered over the little streets, must be collected and cherished as a treasure for the future" (Rudashevski 80-81). 96
(Abraham Sutzkever, for one, had smuggled numerous materials into the ghetto from YIVO
[The Yiddish Scientific Institute] in hope of presewing them [Rudashevski 133-341 and Ona
Simaite routinely smuggled rare texts out, hiding them in the University Iibrary [Friedman
BI),it appears that the primary archivists in the ghetto were its chiIdren. In Meras's novel, the children are the keepers of the arsenal (which is an archive of sorts) of weapons that the ghetîo is slowly amassing. When gogens threatens Kasrielis, Izia's brother, that he will cut his fingers off if he doesn't provide him with information as to where the weapons are hidden, Kasrietis tells Abraomas: "Teve, pasakyk vaikinams, iegul jie kitur pasliepia ginklus"
(1968: 91) 'Father, tell the children to hide the weapons somewhere else' (98). The childrcn also act as librarians and résearchers in the ghetto. Ina only goes to see her friend Marija once the children have come up empty-handed in their search for a score of La Juive:
Siandien generaline repeticija. Pagaliau [. . .].
Laukti negalima ne vienos dienos. Partitiira reikalinga Siandien.
Vaikinai ieSkojo visur, bet negavo. (21)
Today's the final rehearsal. Finaiiy [. . .].
We can't waii any longer. We need the score today.
The children looked for it everywhere but couldn't find it. (22)
Archivists of everyday life in the ghetto, the historical children organized themsetves into
groups with specific topics of discussion and histories to record, and it is in this context that
the archive reaUy began 'to happen.' Yitschok Rudashevski's Diar~of the Vilna Ghetto gives
a detailed account of the activities of such youth groups: Thursday the 22"*[October, 19421
Our youth works and does not perish. Our history group works. We listen to
lectures about the great French Revolution, about its periods. The second
section of the history group, ghetto history, is also busy. We are investigating
the history of Courtyard Shavler 4. For this purpose questionnaires have been
distributed among the members, with questions that have to be asked of the
courtyard residents. WChave already begun the work. I go with a iricnd. The
questions are divided into four parts: questions relating to the period of Polish,
Soviet and German rule (up until the ghetto), and in the ghetto. The residents
answer in diiferent ways. Everywhere, however, the same sad ghetto Song:
property, certificates, hide-outs, the abandonment of things, the abandonment
of relatives. 1 got a taste of the historian's task. 1 sit at the table and ask
questions and record the greatest sufferings with cold objectivity. 1 write, 1
probe into details, and 1 do not realize at ail that 1 am probing into wounds,
and the one who answers me - indifferent to it: two sons and a husband taken
away -the sons Monday, the husband Thursday . . . . And this horror, this
tragedy is formulated by me in three words, coldly and dryly. 1 become
absorbed in thought, and the words stare out of the paper crirnson with blood.
(72-73)
Rudashevski records the oral history of the ghetto, the rumours that circulate throughout: that
fifty Poles have been hanged in Warsaw, and that Jewish policemen are beating Jewish workers (82). The young archivists are not always weIcomed by their subjects, as his "Thursday the Sm" journal entry attests:
Today we also went to Shavler 4 with the questionnaire for investigating the
ghetto. We did not get a good reception. And 1 must sadly admit that they
were right. We were reproached for having calm heads. 'You must not probe
into another person's wounds, our lives are self-evident.' She is right, but 1 am
not at fault either because 1 consider that everything should be recorded and
noted down, even the most gory, because everything will be taken into
account. (84)
Paradoxically, rather than cutting its writers and charactcrs off from thc outside world, the cramped spaces of minor literature have precisely the opposite effect. Close quarters make the authors and actants of minor literatures keenly awarc of the outside world, and of the
îiight lines that lead out to it, as Izia tells Estera: "ZmoniV negalirna aptverti. Kiekvienq nakti, kai viskas aplinkui nutyla, man atrodo, kad girdiiu griausmg. Tai müsi'ikiai" (1968: 29)
'People cannot be fenced in. Each night when it is silent al1 around, 1 ihink that 1 hear the rumble of cannons. Those are our people' (31). The courtyard at Shavler 4 ("~iauli~4" in
Lithuanian) is another example of the cramped space of minor literature. Like Zingeris's
courtyard around the fountain, which stands in for the city of Kaunas (Kovno), as well as ail
of Lithuania under the Soviets, the story of the courtyard at Shavler 4 is synecdochic. [n
teIiing the story of a single courtyard, Rudashevski and his young colleagues in the ghetto
history group teli the story of the entire Vilna ghetto and, by extension, the story of the Shoah
and the fate of the Jews of Europe.
The Lithuanian Librririan as Ghetto Archivist 99
Ona Simaite is a giant in the history of the Vilna ghetto. A librarian at the Vilnius
University, Simaite was granted special privileges by the occupying regime to enter the ghetto supposedly in order to collect books that had been borrowed from the University
Iibrary by Jewish students before ghettoization (Friedman 22); later, as the Gestapo grew impatient, she convinced them to let her enter the ghetto in order to gather antiquarian books.
Instead of books, the librarian more often brought out people. While individual articles on hcr have appeared in various languages, and her story is often included in accounts of the activities of righteous gentiles (in 1966 simaité was the first Lithuanian to bc honoured as such [Simaité, Letter to Juozas UrbSys, 4 June 1966]), there is no comprehensive account of
Ona Simaite's activities in the ghetto. Her story can be pieced together through fragments of what others have said about her, through her letters (as 1 have done here) and, eventually, through her war-time journals (which is a project for the future). Simaité was an extrcmcly ptolific writer of letters, and a voracious reader. Much of her correspondence centres around the exchange of books with friends and the sharing of impressions about newl y appcared texts. During her entire Nazi-period correspondence, simaite refers to the ghetto by name in only one letter:
Per 4 laikq neimoniSkai daug matyta ir iSgyventa. Ir iveriSkas pradas virSija
imoniskq imonèse. 1/IX ui 1,500 rl. iSémiau senukq iS kaiejimo. Ir tq dienq
beiaukiant jo, buvo vedarni kalejiman &tanCiai iydy. O io niekad
nepamirdiu kol gyva büsiu. Siandien gavau iiniy, kad senuko vel nebera.
Turbût jo daugiau niekad nebematysiu. &sta vienas po kito mano geriausieji
prieteliai. Gèda gyventi, gèda turèti pastoge, gèda turèti galimumq nusiprausti 100 ir t.t., kada WtanSiai imones [sic.] ne tik tokiq minimaliniq dalyb nebeturi
[ . . .].
Ir Vilniuje yra ivestas ghetto. Ir 7/IX per vienq dienq buvo visi suvaryti ir tegalejo pasiimti tik tiek su savim, kiek paneSé. O 8/1X, nors tai buvo sekmadienis dienos metu buvo skubiai kalamos dvoros [tvoros], kad atskicti suveStus nuo arijv. O vakar jau II ghetto panaikintas ir kur dingo imones nebeiinau [. . .].
Zveri~kumasir apsnüdimas. Kultürinio gyvenimo beveik jokio.
(Simaite, letter to Kazys Jakubènas, 21 October 1941)
During this period [since my last letter], I've seen and experienced an enormous amount. People's brutal origins ovcrpower their human one. On
September 1" 1 paid 1,500 rubles to get an elderly man out of jail. And even
on hat day, while 1 was waiting for him, thousands more Jews were being Ied
to prison. I'U never iorget it until the day 1 die. Today Igot news that the old
man has disappeared once more. 1'11 probably never see km again. One after
another, my ciosest confidants are dying. I'm ashamed to be alive, ashamed to
have a roof over my head, ashamed to have the possibiiity of bathing, and so
on, when thousands of people don't even have these basic things anymore [. . *I*
A ghetto has been set up in Vilnius too. And on September 7"
everyone was herded there in a single day. They were only allowed to take 101
with them what they could carry. And on September even though it was a
Sunday, fences were humedly nailed together during the day, so as to separate
those who had been brought in from the Aryans. And yesterday the second
ghetto was liquidated, and 1 don't know where those people went [. . .I.
Brutality and lethargy. Almost no cultural life left.
AU the letters that follow this one refer to her activity in the ghetto as her "vaikEiojimai"
'walks,' and as "Q imonig reikalai" 'those people's errands.' The letters of this period
constitute a kind of negative archive: they are conspicuous in what she does not mention by
name, and in what she wants to tell, but cannot:
Maiiausia noréciau koki menesi pabûti atostogosc. Tarnaujant ir daug
vaiwiojant net ibimiegoti negaledama kaip reikiant. Dabar visv pirma miegu
daug, kartais net po 11 val. Paskui gana daug vaikSlioju Q irnoniu reikalais.
Tuas reikalus geriau sutvarkau, nes turiu daug laiko. Pastaruoju metu dar iki
darbo büdavo jègy pavaiwioti, O po darbo taip sunkiai budavo Save priversti
[. . .].
Apie labiausia noréCiau kalbèti - geriau nutyleti. (simaite, letter to
Kazys lakubenas, 28 March 1943)
I'd like to take at least a month off work. What with my job and my walks, 1
haven't been able to get proper rest. Now, above all, I sleep a lot, sometimes
even 12 hours at a tirne. Then I walk a great deal on those people's errands.
I've been taking better care of these matters because 1 have a lot of the. 102
Recently I've had the energy to walk around before work, but after work it
was so difficult to force myself [. . .j.
It's best for me to keep quiet about what I'd really like to tell you.
Simaité's 1941-1943 letters constitute an archive of secrets. Even Liuba Levitska, whose names multiply with each recounting of her story, cannot be named here. Just as Meras's tcxt opens itself out to a larger assemblage, Simaité's correspondence cannot be read without lollowing its passages out to other texts either. Only by reading in connection with othcr texts, can we know that the close Criend whose loss Simaite is mourning is Liuba Levitska:I9
Netekau labai artirnos drauges, kuri 2iauriai nukamuota mire. Tai buvo 22
sausio. Pirmq dienq niekur nerasdavau sau vietos. Bct gyvenu, nes imogus
matyti yra didclè bestija ir egoistas. TaCiau diiaugtis, kaip pirmiau, iS visos
sielos nebemoku. 0, koks baisus tas gyvenimas!
Daug apie kq noréciau su Tavim pakalbeti, bet . . .
Bük meikas, brangus Kazeli. Nots retkarCiais paraSyk man ir ne visai
pamirbk. (simaite, letter to Kazys Jakubènas, 7 March 1943)
1 lost a very close iriend, who died, having been brutaUy tortured. That was on
January 22. The first day 1 didn't know what to do with myself. But 1 continue
to live, because man is evidently a big beast and an egoist. I'm no longer,
l9 See the Appendix 1-5 for the accounts of Levitska's death. Arad dates the death January, 1943 (321); Kruk situates her death before January 27 (The End of Jerusalem of. Lithuania 854-55); Rudashevski puts it before January 29; and Kalish says simply January (8). however, capable of experiencing joy with my entire sou1 Iike before. Oh, how
wretched this life is!
I'd like to talk to you about so many things, but. . .
Take care, dear Kazys. At least, write to me from tirne to time, and
don't forget me completely.
Fatigue, lack of sleep, and shortage of time are constant themes in Simaite's letters to
Jakubénas. We see two worlds at odds in the letters of the period of Nazi occupation: the brutal world of the ghetto, and Simaite's world of books and letters in which she longs to immerse herself. Her letters are written around a tlurry of activity and constant pressure, desccibing the effects of both on her life (exhaustion), but side-stepping their causes. Only later does the missing centre of simaité's narrative begin to be filled, both by the accounts of others and in her post-war letters. Ada Gensaite, the daughter of Jakob Gens (Jokübas
Gen~as),~~the head of the Vilna ghetto police, recounted her recollections of Simaite in a
Vilnius newspaper:
-Su Simaite mes susipaiinome gete. Tèvas murns pasake, kad jinai dirba
Vilniaus universiteto bibliotekoje, ir ateina Cia del to, kad studijuoja tas
knygas. Jis iinojo, koh imoniskq darbq daro simaité - gelbejimo darbq, ir jis,
kiek galedamas, bandé jai viq laM padéti. Turékite omeny, kad padedamas
Gens is an extremely controversial figure in the history of the Vilna ghetto. In most historical accounts, such as Arad's Ghetto in Harnes, Gens is vilified and labeiied as a coiiaborator. Arad, for one, does not write about the connection between Simaité and Gens's family, and has little good to say about him. Ada Gensaite's interview with Jonas Morkus is interesting in terms of the interviewee's attempt to recast her father in a different Light. 1O4 dirbti titoQ darbq jis neturèjo büti pagautas. Ir jis viq laib privalejo büti atsargus, kad, neduok Dieve, vokieCiai nepagautv Simaites ir nepradéti) jos kankinti. Daugiausia Simaiiei talkino mama ir jos sesuo. Jos visuomet iinojo, kur Simaite, kq darys, pas ir kaip. Simaite, pavyzdiiui, priglausdavo vaikus
1ietuviSkose ar 1enkiSkose prieglaudose, O po keliv dienv kunigas jai pasakydavo: "Panele, praSau atsiimti tq vaikq, nes jis erzeliuoja, kalba su stipriu iydiSku akcentu". Kunigas irgi baisiai rizikuadavo. Prieglaudv vaikai patys iririihodavo, jog tas ar kitas yra iydv vaikas. Puolusi i panih, simaité iegkodavo, kur dar tq vaiiq kaip nors paslépti. Simaitè pasirodydavo pas mus regulariai, apie 4-5 valandq po pieti), tuo pat metu, kada tevas pareidavo namo.
Kokiq valandq visi sédedavome ir kalbedavornes. Marna visuornet duodavo
Silto maisto, ir jinai ji iSneSdavo. Jau tuomet mes iinojom jos sunkumus
Vilniaus biblioiekoje. Buvo neimoni3kai Salios iiemos, O ji ten laike imones.
Didiiausia problema jai bCdavo tualetas, reikedavo juk iSneSti naktinius
puodus. VirSuj, ant aukito, jokiv patogumv nsbuvo. [nrSti maistq dar
nebüdavo taip sunku, bet iSneSti naktinius puodus [. . .j. Ji turejo Labai suktis,
kad bendradarbiai nepagaub jos tempiant vis kq nors ivirQ ir i9 virJaus.
Nepaisant viso to, Simaite ranky nenuleido.
- Ar jums buvo iinomi ir kiti iydv gelbetojai?
- NorinCiq padeti nebuvo ypaC daug. (3)
We got to know Simaite in the ghetto. Father told us that she worked in the 105
Vilnius University library and that she came here to study those books. He knew the kind of humanitarian work that Simaite was doing - saving people, and he, as much as he could, always tried to help her. Keep in mind that he couldn't get caught doing this kind of work. And he had to be constantly vigilant, so that, God forbid, the Germans wouldn't catch Simaite and begin to torture her. It was mostly my mother and her sistcr who helped simaite. Thcy always knew where Simaite was, what she was going to do, wherç and how.
Simaite, for example, would place children in Lithuanian or Polish orphanages, but after a few days the priest would Say to her: "Miss, please take that child back, because he's annoying, he speaks with a strong Jewish accent." It was a big risk for the priest as well. The orphanage children deciphered on their own that one or another was the child of Jews. In a panic,
Simaite would look for another place to hide the child. simaite would show up at our house regularly, around 4-5 in the afternoon, the same time that rny father came home from work. We would al1 sit and taIk for about an hour. My mother always gave her some hot food, and she would take it away with her.
At that point we already knew about her difficulties in the Vilnius library. The winters were inhumanly cold, and she was keeping people in there. The biggest problem for her was the toilet, she used to have to cany out night buckets. There weren't any facilities in the attic. To bring food in wasn't such
a problem, but to carry out night buckets [. . .]. She had to be very sneaky, so
her colieagues wouldn't catch her always taking something upstaus or t O6
dragging something downstairs. Despite al1 that, Simaite never gave up.
- Did you know of any others who saved Jews?
-There weren't al1 that many who were wiliing to help.
Simaite loved being a librarian. [n a letter to her niece, Marijona cilvinaite, who atso was a librarian, she called it "the beloved profe~sion."~'For ~imaitè,the library really was an archive that happened. Like most libraries in Eastern Europe, access IO the Vilnius University stacks has always been carefully controlled; even today therc is no browsing allowed. Access to the archive is only passible through the rnediation of a gatekceper. simaite was the gatekeeper of her tirne, and the çlosed ghetto-like structure of the stacks allowed her library to become a piace that not only preserved books, but people as well.
The Librarians were caught in the setting up of ghettos in anoiher way, in that ihey were called upon to create lists of banned books to be taken oui of circulation. Sadly, it is those who knew the literature best and loved it the most who were recruited to facilitate its ghettoization:
Pas mus skubiai ruoSiami iydq autoriq qraSai, kuriv knygos bus ifiimtos. Taip
pat iSimamos visos, be jokios iSimties soviety knygos ir lietuviy paian&q
ra€y:ytojy. Deja, niekad imones taip neskaite Zydv raiytojy, kaip dabar. Gaila,
kad pinniau to nedare ir nesusipaiino su ta turtinga literatka. Tarn, kas nors
kiek paGsta iq literatürq, dabar tenka nuolatos ir nuolatos davùieti
"Pirmiausia, mane labai dwugina, kad Tu dirbi myIimq darbq. ir neturi jokiy materialiniq rüpesCiv. Tebüna Tau, Maryte, visad gerai" 'First of dl, it makes me very happy that you are working in the bdoved profession, and that you have no material worries. May you aiways be well, Ma@' (Simaite, Ietter to Marijona cilvinaité, 2 October 1957). informacijas. (Simaite, letter to Kazys Jakubenas, 12 April 1942)
At work, Lists of Jewish authors whose books will be taken out [of the
libraries] are hurriedly being prepared. Also to be taken out, without
exception, are Soviet books and those by progressive Lithuanian authors.
Sadly, never before have people read Jewish writers as they do now. It's a
shame that they didn't do this earlier, and that they didn't gei io know this rich
literature. Those who know anything at al1 about that literature are now
constantly expected to hand over information about it.
Simaite worked againsi this attempt at the erasure of Litvak writing by hiding (togethcr with the people) letters that people from the ghetto had written to her in the library, along with manuscripts and diaries (Friedman 23). In addition to her efforts to preserve the words, memories, and lives of others, Simaite, having been urged to do so by hcr friends, began to make notes that were to be the basis of her own memoirs:
Mielas, gerasis Kazy! jau 3 savaitès, kaip gjiau. Dékui u-i praleistq dienq
drauge su Tavim. Jq prisiminti labai malonu. Noteau Tau ir anksçiau paragyti,
kad to laiko netmoniskai trüksta. Ilgas tarnybinis darbas ir savo ir nesavo
ivairüs reikalai ir reikaliukai visai nuo kojy nuvaro. Per tq trumpq laikq ir vkl
teko büti liüdininke baisiq dalyky. O visa tai pakka tokias sunkias, sunkias
nuosèdas duSioje.
Pradéjau daryti uiraSus. Nemaniau, kad tiek daug turiu mediiagos. Vis
nauji ir nauji fakiai Skila iS atminties. Ti to laiko taip maiai uiraSams ir 1O8
skaitymui, tarnyba ir begaliniai vakEiojimai viskq surija. O gyvenimas darosi
vis sunkesnis, nes atsiranda vis nauji trükumai. Tatiau ir tas dar bit4 niekis,
jei turériau kiek daugiau laiko ir jei netektq rnatyti tokias begalines imoniv
kadias. (Simaiti?, letter to Kazys Jakubénas, 10 September 1943)
My dear, good Kazys! it's been 3 weeks since my rcturn. Thank you for the
day that we spent together. It's a great pleasure to remernber it. 1 had wanted
to write you carlier, but I'm so inhumanly pressured for time. The long hours
at work, together with various little and big errands - some mine, others not -
are knocking me off my feet with fatigue. In this short period of time [since
my retum] it's been my fate to witness some terrible things. And a11 of this
leaves such a heavy, heavy sediment in my soul.
I've started making notes. 1 didn't think that I'd have so much
material. More and more new facts emerge from my memory. But there's so
Little tirne for notes and reading, as my job and the endless going about
swallow everything up. And life keeps getting more difficult, as new shortages
keep popping up. But even that would bc nothing, if 1 only had a bit more
time, and if 1 didn't see this kind of endless human suffering.
In the spring of 1944 (Porodminskij 16), Simaite was arrested. Initially she was sentenced to death, but unbeknownst to her, the University intewened on her behalf, and she was sent to
Dachau instead. Simaite survived Dachau, was eventualiy transferred to a camp in the south of France, and spent the rest of her iife (with the exception of three years during which she 109 lived in Israel) in Paris, working in her beloved profession. She never knew what had happened either to the letters or the people that she had hidden in the library. The iate of her own notes and diaries was a mystery as well. In 1957, a glimmer of hope came in the iorm of a letter from her niece. This newly re-established contact gave Simaité the opportunity to answer the question, once and for all, of whether or not anything in the library had indeed survived. She wrote to hçr niece, Marijona (Maryté) Cilvinaité, with the iolIowing request:
Atsiminimq apie Vilniaus geto as nesu raiiusi Vilniuje bünant, het kai kuriuos
utraSus dariau. Turejau ir gana vertingos mediiagos (mano nuomonc) gautus
iS geto, ir 200 laibky, raSyty man iS geto. hojoapie tai ir dar kai kurie
imones, kur jie yra. Bet jie man pranei46, kad karas vish sunaikino. Pas mane
vistiek dar liko kai kurios abejonès. Tai ar iuvo, arba kas nors paéme. Tau,
Maryte, aS pasitikiu 100%. Jei Tu galètum paaukoti kick laiko, ir nors
patikrinti tai, kas buvo paslepta Univ. Lituanistikos seminare. Gai tos visos
pastangos nueis veltui. BU4 be galo gaila, jei viskas yra dingç. Jei tikrai gali
padeti, tai padèk ir kitame laiSke pranegiu, kur ieskoti. Nors kartoju, jog maiai
vilties, kad kas nors liko. (Simaité, letter to Marijona Cilvinaité, 2 October
1957)
I didn't write any memoirs about the Vilnius ghetto while 1 was [still] in
Vilnius, but 1 did make some notes. 1 actually had some matecial that 1 had
gotten from the ghetto, and it (in my opinion) was quite valuable, as well as
200 letters that had been written to me from the ghetto. Some oiher people 110
knew where 1 had put them. But they informed me that the war destroyed
everything. Nevertheless, I have some doubts. Perhaps they were destroyed, or
perhaps someone took them. Marytè, 1 trust you 100%. If you could dedicate
some time and at least check for what 1 hid in the Lithuanian Philology
seminar room at the University. It may al1 be for nothing. It would be an
incredible sharne if everything had disappeared. If you rrally can help, then
help, and in the next letter 1'11 teU you where to look. But 1 repeat - there's
little hope that anything sumived.
Once cilvinaite had agreed to help simaite, the latter sent specific instructions as to how to find the letters and manuscripts:
Nieks geriau Tavp neiino, Lituanistikos scminaro patalpy. Bük toki gera,
pasiSvesk, atvaiiuok 1 dienai i Vilniy. O gal ten dar kas tebeguli. Kai ikini if
seminaro po laiptais yra maias sandelis. Ten buvo visokie rakandai. Po ty
rakandg buvau paslépusi IaiSkus raSytus man if Vilniaus getto [sic.], kai
kuriuos savo uiragus - pastabas, O taip pat kelios laikragio ibkarpos. Jei bütq
toks stebükias, ir büty kas uZsilikp - nieko neiSmesk be manp, ir aS Tau
paaiSkinsiu kodêl yra ta ar kita IaikraStinè iSkarpa prideta. Pasikelk laipteliais i
pastoge - ir ten iS desines puses, kur stogas nusileidiia [a tiny diagram is
drawn here] yra uikasta geleiinè dèzutè, kurioje yra G. Sure uiraSai apie
Vilniaus geto. Man pasakojo, kad tos pastogès nebèra, nes nukentejo nuo karo.
Bet aS kodèl hi [sic.] netikiu tam. Labai noréciau, kad tai biitq rasta, nors
praèjo tiek daug metg. Pasistenk tai paiefkoti. Jeigu nieko neberastum, tai 111
nenipek ui [sic.] padetas pastangas. Maiai viIties, O vis tiek dar koks tai
kristelis viltics - O gai yra? Manau, kad mane gerai supranti. (Simaite, letter io
Marijona Cilvinaite, 17 December 1957)
No one knows the Lithuanian Philology seminar room better than you. Be so
kind as to take a day off and corne to Vilnius. It's possible that something's
still Iying there. When you exit the seminar, there's a smaIL cellar under the
stairs. There used to be ait 1Unds of things there. I had hidden the letters
wtitten to me, some of my notes - observations, as well as some newspapcr
clippings under those things. If by some miracle sornething were lefi - don't
throw anything away without me, and 1'11 explain to you why this or that
newspaper clipping is included. Go upstairs to the attic - and on the right,
whece the roof dopes down [a tiny diagram is drawn bere], there's a metal box
buried, which contains G. hras's notes about the Vilnius ghetto. 1 was told
that this attic is no longer there, that it was darnaged by the war. But for some
reason 1 don7 believe it. 1 very much wani for these things to be found, even
though so many years have gone by. Try to look for thcm. If you didn't find
anything, don't regret your efforts. There's iittle hope, but there's stiii some
sort of tiny crystal of hop - maybe something's there? 1 think you
understand me weii.
Simaité was devasted when CiWiaiie came back with the news that she had found no signs 112 of the materials her aunt had hidden a~ay.~Al1 her work, and al1 the danger in which she had put herself and her colleagues, it seemed, had been for nothing. What she didn't know, however, is that Suras's manuscript had rniraculously survived both the Nazi occupation and the fifty-year Soviet regime. ~uras'snotes were published in Lithuanian as UiraSai: Vilniaus geto kronika 1941-1944 (Notes: The Vilnius Ghetto Chronicle 1941- 1944) in 1997.
According to a foreword by Vladimir Porudminskij: "Tuoj pat po karo Ona Simaite paraSé iS
Prancüzijos laiJb ituo metu Vilniuj ikurh Zydv [sic.] rnuziejq: nurod6 vietq, kurioje ji pasliepè Grigorijaus Suro rankraSti (dvi pakeliamosios lentos Universiteto bibliotekos grindyse) - ir uiraSai iSvydo Svieq" 'Immediateiy after the war, Ona simaite wrote to the
Jewish museum that had just been founded: she indicated the spot in which shc had hidden
Grigorijus SurasYsrnanuscript (under two loose boards in the floor of the University library)
-and the notes saw the Light of day' (16). If this account of the manuscript's history is correct, it means that it had probably already been found by the time Simaite wrote the above letter to her niece. ~uras'smanuscript was probably housed in the Jcwish museurn in Vilnius that was set up irnmediately after the war, but disappearcd once the museurn was prornptly closed down as a result of Stalinist persecution of Jewish organizations. Why Ona Simaite was not informed that the manuscript had been saved remains a mysiery. Simaite's tiny diagram23that shows where the text was buried is cartography-art. It shows the trace of a text that has long-since fled through a passage unknown, even to her, into a rnuseum that then
See hnaitevsletter CO (%inaite (18 May 1958), Appendix 17.
xi See Appendix 16 for the diagram. 113 ceased to exist. Both the map and the mapped are deterritorialized: the former can only indicate a misplaced object, while the found object can not tell how it got there - flight lines without known destinations.
Despite the devastating news, Simaite, eternal archivist, con tinued to prepare her notes and to send manuscripts to her niece to have them preserved. In the 1960s, Simaité began a correspondance with a young Jewish writer in Soviet Lithuania:"
Sio kiirinio [Lveiosios trunka akimirka] imtis paskatino Paryiiuje gyvenusi
Ona Sirnaite, Mesi asmenybe, dvasios aristokraté [. . .I. Simaités draugy dirbo
'Vagos' leidykloje. Jie i Paryiiq jai nusiunté 1. Mero 'Geltonq lopg'.
Perskaitiusi knygq Simaite parahi jos autoriui. RaSytojas niekada nesusitiko
su Sia rnoterimi, bet abu bendravo laibkais. 0. Simaité ji jtikino, kad turis
paraSyti apie kasdienini iydq didvyrifkurnq gete, papasakojo geto istorijq.
Vien4 iS jy Meras panaudojo romane. (Karnackaite 15)
Ona Simaite, an enlightened individual and aristocrat of the spirit, then living
in Paris, encouraged [Merasl to undertake the writing of this novel [Stalemate]
[. . . 1. Some of Simaite's friends were [then] working at the publishing house
'Vaga.' They sent a copy of 1. Meras's "YeUow Patch" to her in Paris. Once
24 Meras wrote a short greeting to Simaite on the occasion of her seventieth birthday that was published in a Lithuanian newspaper in 1964, and was enritled "NuoSirdi knygos bit%ie7' 'A Sincere Friend of the Book.' 1 found this newspaper clipping among Simaite's letters, and it appears to have been mis-GIed (see works consulted for the fie number in which it was found). The source of the article is hand-written at the bottom, but is illegible. 114
she read the book, Simaite wrote its author a letter. The writer never met this
woman, but the two corresponded through letters. 0. Simaite convinced him
that he had to write about the everyday heroism of the Jews in the ghetto, and
told him stories about the ghetto. Meras used one of these in his novel.
Simaiie leads us right back to Meras. Mer letters to the young author acted as a source for his novel about the Vilna ghetto, and as such, is part of the same cairn, or assemblage, of which
L&osios is part. It is clear that Meras's text is a text written by many hands, not the least of which are Simait~~s.Meras's text is thus a text of minor literaturc. The assemblage comprised by the entirety of the texts of the Vilna ghetto archive is also a minor literature.
This is an archive in a state of continual becoming; it is a map which lays out passages and flight lines in and out of the ghetto: it is a deterritorialized space. The archive, itself, is a minor literature.
Reading Meras's Literary Archive
The Soviets were very good archivists, and the Literature and Art Archive of the
Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (now called Lietuvos Literatiiros ir Meno Archvvas
'Lithuania's Literature and Art Archive') was no exception. The archive contains drafts and
manuscripts of many Lithuanian writers of the Soviet period, including the papers of
icchokas Meras. Meras's files contain film scripts, novel typescripts, short stories, newspaper
clippings, translations, and various documents. The contents of the author's archive arc:
obviously extremely eclectic, and attest to a fascination with technology, with Judaica, and
with the West. Some technologicaliy concerned materials to be found there inctude articles
on chernical processes for drying wood ("Skystis prie5 skystr 'Liquid Against Liquid'); on 115 safety features of automated looms ( "Kai nutruksta sidas" 'When the Thread Breaks'); and on a cybernetic tortoise ("Stebükiingas véilys" 'The Miraculous Tortoise'). Western humour has a place in the archive, in the fom of a collection of AmeRcan jokes ("IS uisienio jümuro"
'Humour From Overseas'), as well as Meras's translation of Stephen Leacock's
(transliterated as "Stefanas Likokas") "~imtaproccntinisamerikietis" 'One Hundred Percent
American' which was prepared for Kelme's (Meras's homeiown) journal Bolkvikinis Zodis
(The Bolshevik Word) (1954). Meras's translation of Sholom-Aleichem's story "Jei büÇiau
RotSildu" 'If 1 Were Rothschild' is accompanied by his own Soviet reading of the story, and his interpretation of the protagonist as a good mode1 for the Soviet citizen. In addition to al1 this, the archive contains the author's birth certiiicate, library cards, report cards (Meras was a straight-A student), his credentials as a journalist for the official press, and his chess-club card. Each text and document in this archive Ieads to another, and another, and so on.
Nevertheless, some journeys in this archive are longer than others: while the chess card and the Sholom-Aleichem translationLSlead through a long passage to the novel, Ly~iosiostrunka aicimirka. the article on the cybernetic tortoise probably Ieads to a dead end.
The tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization is especially evident in this archive. On the one hand, the archive is a testament to the official Soviet press and there is even a nod to Socialist reaiismt6 (Meras's training as an electrical engineer came in
* An important intertext for L~@osiostrunka alcimirkg is Sholom Aleichem's "A Page from the Song of Songs." Izia imagines that he is Shimek, the protagonist of the "Song of Songs," and that Estera is Buzia, his love interest.
26 The archive contains the outline of what appears to be a socialist realist novel from 1959 caiied Suamai atauea (Winns Grow Back); the novel, unfinished it seems, was to teU handy here), while on the other hand, the archive's contents push the boundaries of taboos, through a fascination with both the West and with themes Jewish. The archive, most notably, contains early drafts of novels and short stories, some of which differ significantly irom their published versions. I've already pointed to the 'cleaning out' of the novel Lveiosios trunka akimirh that occurred in its later stages of publication (the most significant changes happened between the 1968 and 1998 versions of the text), and not at the draft stage. In the case of Meras's 1971 novel, Menulio savaite (Moonweek), however, the draft found in the archive (which contains matenal that would have challenged Soviet sensibilities) is drastically different from the first published version of the text. Opening his texts out into the archive, therefore, allows us to read Meras's novels as continually becoming, and it allows us to recognize the tension between deterritorialization and reterritorializatirin that is othenvise almost invisible.
The original scrapbook-form of Mènulio savait6 echoes the structure of Meras's literary aichive. [t too is an eclectic assemblage of seemingly unrelated clippings and stories.
This text eventually, like hniosios trunka akimirka, becomes cleaned of unsightty passages,
the love story between Poviliukas Budreika, a factory worker, and Milda, a future doctor, and how their lives changed due to technology and automation, as well as their trials and tribulations in finding an apartment in which to live. Poviliukas has found a way to make the factory more efficient, but his superiors are reluctant to accept and implement his ideas. Another piece of socialist realism in the archive is ri story caiied "Kaip gyveno tekintojo kirna" 'How the Woodworker's Family Lived' (1957). Its former title, which is crossed out on the typescript, was "Pranas Sturas gerai gyvena!" 'Pranas Sturas Lives Well!'. In this story, Pranas, the father, works in a loom factory (1 suspect the above-mentioned article on loom safety was research for this unfinished novel) and his family lives in a nearby house. Mrs. Sturas stays at home and takes care of their son. The farnily is proud of the factory, which is renowned throughout the Soviet Union. 117 which are then relegated to the archive. I have talked about the ghetto as archive in the context of L-veiosios tninka akimirb but here, with the introduction of Menulio savaite, the archive becomes ghetto: it is where the unwanted, unsuitable, and unfashionable passages are enclosed. Chapter Three will explore the continuatiy changing text, Menulio savaité. Moonweek, Mouvancg and Mulîiplicity
This short, very odd novel of Icchokas Meras's was published twice, under two diiierent titles. [n 1971 it was published by Vapa, the official publisher of Soviet Lithuanian belles lettres under its title Menulio savaite (Moonweek). ln 1998 the text was re-published by the Lithuanian Writers' Union of independent Lithuania alongside two other short novels:
Ant ko laikosi ~asauiis(What the World Rests On) and Lveiosios trunka akirnirkq
(Stalemate). Ménulio savaite appears here completely transformed and under a new title Tics gahrts libintu (F,wiwith a new dedication and designation (by the author) of the text as a "vaikiSkas romanas" 'childish novel.' The changes to the text arc radical: al1
Soviet references have been removed, as well as the problematic romantic retationship between victim and perpeirator.' As mentioned in my preceding discussion of Lv~iosios, there is no introduction to the texts indicating that thcy have been changed (at least two of the three texts have been edited) in any way since their original appearance in Soviet Lithuania of the late 1960s and early 1970s - only a tiny note that accompanies the copyright material on the very last page of the book indicates that a) these texts are reprints, and b) that they have kenchanged since their original appearance. The note reads as follows: "Su romantiniu
' After many meetings inside the waU, the young ghetto girl learns that the boy whorn she loves and who ulthately heips her escape, is the sarne boy who stole her mother's wedding ring and caused her death when she tried to exchange it for a loaf of bread ihrough the ghetto ience (she was shot for trying to go after the thief). Her cornpanion is at once a hero and a perpetrator (1971: 133). 119 patosu vaizduojamas pasmerktq imoniq irididumas, kantia, rezignacija, kontrastigkai gretinami iydq, vokietiy, iietuviv nacionalines pasaulejautos tipai. Autorius, pateikdamas spaudai Si leidini anksçiau spausdintus romanus redagavo. Labiausiai patiko 'Ties gatves iibintu'. Ankstesinis jo pavadinimas buvo 'Menulio savaite"' 'The pride, suffering, resignation of an oppressed people is illustrated here with romantic pathos; the world views of Jews, Germans and Lithuanians are juxtaposed. Before handing over thcse novels to be rc- rcleased, the author edited them. "Ties gatves iibintu" appealed to him the most. Its former title was "Menulio savaite"' (336). Al1 that is leit of the original published version (which contains a great deal of 'found material' like newspaper clippings and excerpts of radio broadcasts) is a simple story of a young boy and girl who meet inside the crarnped spacc of the ghetto wail. The boy steals food for the girl (both hmhis father and from a soldier whom he kills), and reads to her each day. Eventually hc takes her out oi the ghetto. The girl is shot dead during their attempted escape.
In the ioiiowing discussion 1 wiil consider ihree versions of Menulio savaite: the 1971
Soviet version, the 1998 (Ties eatves kibintu) post-Soviet version, and an rariier unpublished
typescript dated 1966.' 1 wiii attempt to theorize the instability of Meras's text, by tracing its
retooling and 'cleaning out' that began with the typescript in 1966 and continued for 32
years. ln theory, this process could continue indefinitely, producing an infinite number of
texts, as there is no reason (apart irom the waning health of the author) to believe that the
* As with the wosios, 1 refer to each of the three versions of -savaité by year: 1966 refers to the archival typescript, 1971 to the version pubiished under the Soviets, and 1998 to the version entitled Ties eatves iibintu, which appeared in Trvs romanai (Three Novels). 120 1998 version of this work is the final one. Menulio savaite, in this sense, exemplifies the characteristic continua1 becoming of minor literature. Here we have a text that is constantly changing and will never be finished: Menulio savaite is a multiplicity. Three concepts will become increasingly important in rny analysis of the textual history of Menulio savaité: multiplicity, collectivity - which hava already been discussed in the context of Lv~iosios- and mouvance. This latter term is borrowed from Paul Zumthor's theory of oral poetry, as outlined in his Toward a Medieval Poetics. It is a term that will prove usehl in evaluûting the issue of multiple versions of texts that we find in minor literature, and especially in Soviet and post-Soviet texts.
Menulio savaité: A Textual History
The textual history of Menulio savaite is characterized by two concepts: reduce and recycle. With each appearance, the text becomes shorter, neater, cleaner. The 1966 typescript and 1971 published text are, for the most part, very similar. Both texts begin with juxtapositions of found material describing a Storm in Sweden, hunger around the world, car accidents in Morocco, underground nuclear weapons testing in the United States, reports on the Vietnam War, and excerpts of documents from the Eichmann trial. Both texts contain the love story of two children who meet inside the wail of a former monastery that separates the
Jewish ghetto lrom the outside world. Menulio savait4 is a text that, in its eacliest incarnations, mirrors its author's Literary archive. Like Meras's archive, this short novel starts out as an eclectic mix of articles, facts, and micro-narratives. We have seen through the preceding discussion of Lv~iosiosthat the ghetto is an archive. Here with Menulio savaite, the archive becomes a ghetto containhg unwanted, rejected passages, and fragments of his 121 mer-changing text. What the archived 1966 typescript contains that never made it to
publication are Lithuanian Nazi collaborator confessions and eye-witness accounts. Each
offender is narned, but whether this testimony is found material or whether it is fictional is
unclear. The Grst such confession that the reader of Meras's archive encounters is entitled "15
J. GerrnanaviÇiaus parodymy" 'From J. GermanaviCius's testimony.' It ceads:
Jokio atlyginimo ui dalyvavimq, rnasiSkai Saudant tarybinius pilieCius, iS
vokieeiy negavau, O gaudavau tik 180 markiq algos per ménesi ir nemokamq
rnaistq. 1.4 Saudymo vietos, kur buvo suSaudytyjy avalynè ir drabuiiai, nieko
nepaèmiau, nes tuos daiktus sukraudavo i masinq, ir vokieeiai juos kaZkur
ihetdavo.
TaEiau turiu pasakyti, kad, iskraudamas iS ektono suiaudytqjy pilieGy
daiktus, pasiemiau aulinius batus, kelnes ir keletq porg baltiniu. (1966: 11)
1 didn't get any compensation from the Germans for my participation in the
mass shootings of Soviet citizens? instead 1 used to get a mere 180 marks
along with free food. 1 didn't take anything irom the shooting area, where the
victims' shoes and ciothes were, because they would load those ihings into a
car, and the Gerrnans would take them someplace.
Except 1 should say that whiie unloading shot citizens' things kom the
Soviet era discussions and monuments (for example the monument at PonarRaneriai) reier to the victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania as "Soviet citizens." The fact thar the victims were ovenvhelmingly Jewish is mentioned either as an afterthought, or more ofien, not at au. 122 train, 1 did take a pair of low boots, pants and a couple pairs of underwearm4
Other passages relegated to the archive-ghetto, in addition to the GermanaviCius testirn~ny cited above, are two excerpts from a perpetrator called Baranauskas: one €rom a perpetrator called Barka~skas,~one from Galdikauskas,' and one from Naudiiünas."t also includes an excerpt from an order issued by Bortkevieius for Russians and Poles to proceed to ghettos in the suburbs of Kaunas,' and testimony by a witness named Macienè1' -the only woman whose testimony is included. None of these passages appeared in either the Soviet (1971) or post-Soviet (1998) publications of the novel. In total, eight passages describing Lithuanian
participation in the killing of Jews and in the persecution of rninority groups were removed
prior to publication. Perpetrators named within testimony include Juozas SliesoraitisL1and
Kontautas. Only one passage containing perpetrator testimony survived to pubkation:
'This GermanaviCius, it seems, was a baltaraigtis, a volunteer thug who collaburated with the occupying Nazi army. Unlike the Latvians, Lithuanians werc not conscripted into the Nazi army.
See Appendix 18 a and b.
See Appendix 19. ' See Appendix 20. ' See Appendix 21. See Appendix 22.
L0 See Appendix 23.
l1 According to Documents Accuse, an Algirdas Sliesoraitis was the Chief of Staff the Iron Wolf, chairman and general secretary of the Lithuanian Activist Front (296). 123 narnely testimony by F. Jekelnas. Jekeln(as)I2 is not a Lithuanian name, and the war crimes he describes in his testimony have taken place in the much broader area of Ostland, rather than Lithuania specificaiiy, and the victims are Gypsies rather than Jews. Jeckeln is a German name, and the F. Jekelnas of Menulio savaite refers to "F. Jeckeln, former Chief of the
Osiland SS and police force, whom the Soviet Court sentenced to dcath in Riga in 1946"
(Documents Accuse 62). The one surviving piece of coiiaborator testimony reads as follows:
19 F. Jekelno parodyml
Klausimas: Papasakokite apie tigonq nailcinima Ostlande.
Atsakymas: 1943 m. viduryje gestapo ir SD kfas jsakè jam pavaldiioms SD ir
gestapo istaigoms uidrausti tigonams kilnotis, juos sugaudyti ir ignaikinti.
Klausimas: JUs isakyrnq jvykdete?
Atsakymas: Taip, a5 tai padariau. (1966: 65; 1971: 75)
From F. Jekelnas's testimony
Question: Tell us about the extermination of the Gypsies in Ostland.
Answer: In mid-1943 the chief of the Gestapo and SD ordered those under his
command to forbid the Gypsies €rom moving around, to capture them and to
exterminate them.
Question: You fotiowed this order?
l2 Non-Lithuanian narnes are "Lithuanianized" for the purposes of declension by adding an '-as7 onto the end (as in Biii'as Ctinton'as), or by adding the appropriate feminine ending (married Hilary [Hilarél Clinton'iene; unmarried Chelsy [telsi] CiintonTaite). Complete transliterations such as kkspyras (Shakespeare) are common in Lithuanian as weU. 124 Answer: Yes, 1 did.
This first stage of editing in Mènulio savaitè is intriguing, as the removal of the collaborator testimony immediately smacks of censorship. But what reason could there be for either
Soviet censors or for an author's interna1 censor to remove material about atrocities committed by Lithuanians under the enemy's occupation? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to visit the larger problem of historiography of the Holocaust in the USSR. The case of Ilya Ehrenburg" and Vassili Grossman's" Black Book is a useful place to start such a discussion first of al1 because it allows us to rcconstruct the process of editing and censorship through real textual evidence, rather than conjecture; and secondly, because The Black Book has ties to Vilnius/Vilna: it, like Simaite's letters, connccts to the larger Vilna ghetto archive through flight lines. The text returns again and again - via passages that lead to the Vilna poet Abraham Sutzkever, and to the short-lived post-war Jewish museum - to the city the
Litvaks called Jerusalem of the North, its place of conception, gestation and (re)birth many years iater. Also like Simaite's letters, The Black Book's textual history is characterized by removal, disappearance, and contradictory accounts.
The example of The Black Book tells us several things about the representation of the
Holocaust in the Soviet Union and about the constant negotiation that was necessary in order
to bring such a project to fruition. The case of The Black Book is useful for my study of
l3 Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was a writer, journalkt and public personality. His works include the novels The Fa11 of Paris. The War. The Storm, The Thaw, and his major work, a six-volume memoir cailed Men. Years. Life.
l4 Vasili Semyonovich Grossman (his real name was Iosif Solomonovich) (1905- 1964) was an engineer, joumalist and writer. His story "Treblisky ad" (Treblinka Heu) was ditributed at the Nuremberg trials. His major work is the novel Life and Fate. 125 Menulio savaite because it is one of the few times that we have concrete textual evidence that says 'this is why this book is unpublishabIe.' The story of The Black Book sheds light on the reasons why Meras would have removed certain passages from his novel, as what becomes clear in the former's history is the extreme reluctance on the part of the Soviets to publish materials dealing with the collaboration of locat populations in the annihilation of the Jews.
Again and again, it is the problem of collaboration that returns in the editorial remarks and criticism surrounding the project of The Black Book, and it is the representation OC collaboration that ultimately sinks the hopes for its publication in the USSR. Although, unlike The Black Book, Menulio savaité was able to negotiate its way into existence - something both the Soviet Thaw and Vilnius's physical distance from Moscow allowed for - a censor's hand is nevertheless palpabte in this text too, determining what could and could not be recounted about the Holocaust in the USSR.
The Black Book: A Case Study of the Historiography and Representation of the
Holocaust in the USSR
Traditionally, most of the discussion surrounding reasons for the striking lack of representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union has been anecdotal. We can usually only guess at the reasons for the removal of text, for the banning of a poem or book, or for the
refusa1 to build a monument, but rarely have we had access to documents that would confirm
our suspicions. With the opening up of state and KGB archives, this has begun to change.
One text that has had an even more complex textual history than Meras's novels is Ilya
Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman's Black Book The Black Book was originaiiy conceived of
as a text that would recount the murder of Jews in Soviet territones. It is useful as a point of 126 comparison to Meras's ever-changing texts because several extremely different versions of the text were published. As a result of a careful reconstruction of the textual history O€%
Black Book which was made possible through tracing a paper trail in the Soviet archives, there is now a great deal of tcxtual evidence that sheds light on the question of what was publishable and unpublishable under the Soviets. In a strange set of coincidences, the story OC
The Black Book is one that begins and ends in VilnaNilnius.
The Black Book was first conceived of as a result of Ehrenburg's friendship with
Abraham Sutzkever, the great Yiddish poet of the Vilna ghetto. It was Sutzkever's stories about the ghetto resistance that brought Ehrenburg to the conviction that the story of the murder of the Jews in the territories of the Soviet Union had to be told. In 1943, Ehrenburg planned to publish three books. The first, "the black book," was to tell of the murder of
Soviet Jews under the Nazis, the second "red book" was to tell of the Jewish heroes who had participated in the Great Patriotic War, and the third book was to tell about Jewish partisans who fought on German-occupied Soviet temtories. Only the first book, for which work was begun in 1943, was ever realized, and the history of its publication, we will Xe, is an extremely complicated one. Several versions and translations of those versions have seen the light of day, and with each new Black Book yet another history of the manuscript is recounted which differs slightly from ail those that preceded it. The rextual history recounted here is based on that presented in the 1995 French translation of the 1993 Russian text which was published in Vilnius with a print mn of 6,000. In 1993, no Russian edition had yet been published on Russian soil. The foreword to this edition is written by Irina Ehrenbourg
(French transiiteration), Ilya Ehrenburg's daughter. Her account is supported by documents 127 found in her iather's persona1 archive aiter his death. The preiace is written by Ilya Altman.
According to Altman's preface, the original idea to publish a Black Book can be attributed not solely to Sutzkever, but also to Albert Einstein who made this suggestion to
Feferls and Mikhoels, the president of the (Soviet) Jewish Antifascist Committee during
their visit to the United States in 1943. In 1944 the literary commission of the Jewish
Antifascist Committee told Ehrenburg: "Faites un livre, s'il est bon, on lc publiera" 'Make a
book, if it's good, we'll publish it' (Le livre noir 14). A note from September 8 of the samc
year outlines the original idea of what the "good" book should be:
Ce Livre sera constitué de récits de Juifs rescapés, de témoins des atrocités,
d'instructions des autorités allemandes, de journaux intimes et de témoignages
des bourreaux, de notes et de journaux de personnes ayant échappé aux
massacres. Ce ne sont pas là des actes, des procès-verbaux, mais des récits
vivants qui doivent faire apparaître la profondeur de la tragidie.
Il est extrêmement important de montrer la solidariti de la population
soviétique [. . -1, II est indispensable de montrer que les Juifs mouraient
courageusement, de s'arrêter sur tous les actes de résistance. (The Jcwish
Antifascist Committee qtd. in Le livre noir 20)
It will be a book constituted of stories about escaped Jews, about the witnesses
Yizik Solomonovich Fefer (1900-1952) was an extremely prolific playwright, essayist, and the leading Yiddish poet of the mid-1920s. He was a leader in Jewish writers' organizations in the Ukraine, as weU as in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee which was founded during World War II. 128 of atrocities, of the instructions of the German authorities, of the intimate
journals and the testirnonies of the executioners and of notes and joumals of
people who escaped the massacres. These are not records or memoranda, but
living stories that must make the depth of the tragedy apparent.
It is extrernely important to show the solidarity of the Soviet
population [. . .]. It is essential to show that the Jews died courageously, to
pause at each act of resistance.
The documents that make up the body of the text (some 1,200 pages) were collected by co- editors Ehrenburg and Grossman. The sentiment that the solidarity of Soviet subjects should
always be highlighted was one that would guide the project until ils demise in 1948, and the
politics of portraying specif cally Jewish suffering was a constant point of contention
between the two editors. Ehrenburg and Grossman disagreed fundamentally on the use of the
term 'Jew' in the book. Archival material contains Grossman's comments:
When 1 read the material [. . .] 1 was struck by the al1 too frequent use of the
word 'Jew.' [. . .] [Ilf the book as a whole is about Jews, then we should avoid
the use of the word 'Jcw.' Othetwise this word will be repeated 6,000 timrs
and wiii irritate the reader. We can write 'they assembled the people,' or
'people went to the square,' or 'five people fell,' without writing the word
'Jew.' (qtd. in Gitelman 19)
To this Ehrenburg repiied that the term 'Jew' was unavoidable.
The main point of contention, and the 'grave political error' that finaiiy killed the
project in 1948, was the representation of collaboration with the Nazis. It was made clear that 129 heroic stories of rescue were to be highlighted and stories of collaboration to be downplayed.
Ehrenburg, despite his uncomproinising stance on the use of the term 'Jew,' did bend on the issue of cotlaboration. Instead of naming a collaborator, or designating him by his nationality, Ehrenburg used the word "politsa?' (a Russian transliteration of the German word
-Polizei [police]) to designate a collaborator: "By 'polibai' we understand not a Gcrman, but a traitor. Estabiishing just who exactly was a politsai will be very difficult. 1 didn't take out the word 'Jew' but 1 did take out the word 'Ukrainian' and wrote 'pditsai"' (Ehrenburg, qtd. in
Gitelrnan 19). Already in 1944 members of a Soviet state commission to investigate Nazi crimes used the word 'politsai' to conccal Ukrainian collaboration, so by 1946-47, this coding was well-estabIished and the euphemism understood (29 Gitetman).16
Ehrenburg's original plan was to publish The Black Book in severai languages. It was to be an international project, and in 1944 a cornmittee for the publication of The Black Book was created in the Unired States and placed under the direction of B.C. Goldberg and Naum
Goldman of the World Jewish Congress. An international editorial committee was then created (for its exact rnake-up, see Le livre noir 21). In the Soviet Union, the Jewish
Antifascist Cornmittee maintained contact with the international editorial committee independently of the literary commission - a smaller body which answered to the JAC, and of which the editors, Ehrenbug and Grossman, were part.
"The use of euphemism here is puzziing, as one must wonder what the point of encoding is if everyone knows what the euphemism means. For more on Soviet 'reading between the lines,' see Ritardas Gavelis's "Censorship as an Exterminator of a Real World," as well as Tomas Venclova's "Game of the Soviet Censor." 130 The story of the numerous versions of the text begins in 1944 when 552 pages of documents colIected in the USSR were sent by Fe kr and Epstein to the US without
Ehrenburg's knowledge. This was supposedly done at the request of US ambassador to the
USSR, Andrei Gromyko. The result of this initial communication was an English language publication that was published in 1946, and which bears Little resemblance to anyrhing subsequently published in the Soviet Union, its satellite statcs, or Israel:
Le dessein de l'édition américaine était beaucoup plus vaste, et les docurnents
concernant l'URSS ne devaient en constituer qu'une partie [. . .j. Ainsi, un
travail parallèle était mené au CAJ (en 1943) et à la Commission Iittéraire sur
Les éditions américaine et soviétique, et ce [sic], en absence de la coordination
et de la coopération nécessaires, ce qui a conduit en fin de compte un grave
conflit. (Le livre noir 20-21)
The American plan was much vaster, and the d incerning the USSR
were only supposed to constitute one part [of the project] [. . .].Thus, the JAC
(in 1943) and the Literary Commission conducted work in paralle1 on the
Arnerican and Soviet editions, and it was the absence of necessary cooperation
that, in the end, led to a serious conflict.
Whereas the Iatet publications represented Ehrenburg's vision of the book - raw documents
grouped by region that spoke for themselves -the 1946 American version represents
Grosman's vision of the book. The 1946 version has digested and synthesized testimonials,
thereby creating a coherent historical narrative. The American edition of The BIack Book had 131 been ready for publication in 1945, and the committee for its publication had oniy to wait on the JAC's approval of the text, which contained a preface by Albert Einstein. This preface, which argued for the consideration of the Jewish people as a nation (as that is how it was treated by its enemy) and stressed that the Jews sufiered more than anyone eIse at the hands of the Nazis, proved to be the reason for the JAC's slow response to the American cornmittee's text. The preface was suppressed. (Einstein's preface is reproduced as an appendix in Le livre noir in 1995.)
With the sending of the documents to the United States, the communal nature of the project began to fa11 apart. Ehrenburg wrote to his contributors - sorne thirty people,
including Sutzkever - teüing them to do with their contributions what they wished. A new
literary committee was created, from which Ehrenburg was excluded, and of which
Grossman was the only remaining original member. The new committee reviewed the
manuscript and came back with several suggestions, most of which had been encountered
earlier: that the role of coiiaborators not be stressed as such documents could bc: used to
support the daim that local populations had started the massacres without Nazi coercion; that
the collaboration of the Judenrat not be represented as such, and that its members be
represented as unquestionably heroic (Le livre noir 26). The manuscript was then edited
according to these suggestions.
Early in 1946, the manuscript was copied and distributed to ten countries: Australia,
England, Bulgaria, Italy, Mexico, France, Rumania, USA, and Palestine (this manuscript
served as the basis for the 1980 israeli text). The Russian version was ready for publication 132 and Mikhoels, Fefer, Grossman and Ehrenburg wrote to Zhdanov,17 asking him to help the book be allowed to appear promptly. Later, word was received from Der Emes (Yiddish for
"The Truth") publishing house that for "technical reasons" it couldn't guarantee publication, and on February 3, 1947, word was given that the publication of The BIack Book was not tu happen (Le livre noir 30). The reasons given by Nexandrov for the denial of publication were: becausç manuscripts had been sent abroad and published in the US without the assent
of the authorities; because it gave a false idea of the nature of fascism in that it gave the
impression that the only reason that the Nazis fought the USSR was to exterminate its Jewish
population; because atrocities against people of other nationalities were not representcd (Le
livre noir 30). The same year, Ehrenburg sent two albums containing 413 pages to the Jewish
Museum in Vilnius for temporary conservation (the same museum that had housed Suras's
notes), on the understanding that the documents would be nturned to him if he nerded them
for his work.
A print nin of 30,000 copies had been planned, and printing had already started when
on August 20, 1947, the otder came to halt. The final document concerning the publication of
The Black Book is reproduced in the French translation of the 1993 cdition: "u~ivrenoir a
été soigneusement examiné par la Direction de la propagande. Cet ouvrage contient de
sérieuses erreurs politiques. Sa publication en 1947 n'a pas été entennée par la Direction de
l7 Andrey Neksandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948) was a member of the Bolsheviks from 1915 and rose through the ranks after the October Revolution of 1917. A close associate of Joseph Stalin, he reached the peak of his career after World War II, when as a full member of the Politburo he severely tightened the ideological guidelines for cultural endeavours, putting into place an anti-Western policy referred to as 'Zhdanovism' (Zhdanovshchina). His death in 1948 is shrouded in mystery. 133 la propagande. Par conséquent, le Livre noir ne peut pas être édité" 'The Black Book has been carefuiiy examined by the Propaganda Board. This work contains serious political errors. Its publication in 1947 has not been ratified by the Propaganda Board. Consequently,
The Black Book cannot be published7 (qtd. in Le livre noir 31). The document was signed M.
Morozov, "le chef du département de l'édition de la Direction de la propagande et de l'agitation du Comité central du Parti communiste (bolchevik) de l'URSS 'the Head of the
Publication Department of the Propaganda and Agitation Board of the Central (Bolshevik)
Communist Party of the USSR' (Le livre noir 31), October 7, 1947. One week later, the publisher asked the JAC to come get the printed portions of the book. Both the texts and printing plates were destroyed.
The aftermath was disastrous for many who had been associated with The Black
-Book. Less than two months alter the order came to halt printing, Mikhoels was assassinatrd in Minsk. In 1948 JAC militants were arrested, including individuals who had worked on
Black Book (the manuscript of which was confiscated), and the JAC was liquidated exactly a year after the publication had been denied. On November 20, 1948 Ehrenburg had his own manuscript returned to him from ViInius. Ai1 other documents that had been prepared (and not subsequently destroyed) were kept in the archives of national defence (MGB)then transferred to the secret central staie archive - today the State Archive of the Russian
Federation, which was opened up to researchers in 1989. The text was edited, it seems, once again in the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947. In 1960 the Museum of History in Viinius bonowed the manuscript, and a year Iater, Ehrenburg asked once again for it to be returned, saying he needed it for his work. In 1965 Ehrenburg once again found himself involved in 134 negotiations about the possibility of the pubiication of The Black Book, but nothing came of them. The 1993 Russian (Vilnius) edition uses the 1947 approved edition as its standard, reinserting censored portions as much as possible.
Mathes the Example of The Black Book Tell Us?
Much has been written about Soviet anti-Semitisrn and about Soviet suppression of the Holoca~st,~~but we have little concrete evidence to support the claim that this was in fact official Soviet policy. It is clear that the Holocaust was suppressed, and that its represcntation in the Soviet Union always came under the umbrclla of a universal anti-fascist struggle.
While it is undeniable that there was anti-Sernitisrn in the Soviet Union, whether or not it was an official policy is still unclear.19 Meras's experience with Soviet censors seems to support
Zvi Gitelman's ciaim that "if there was a policy of repressing the Holocaust [in Soviet historiography and literature], it was applied unevenly at best" (18). Texts like Meras's novels, that would have been unpublishable in Moscow, managed to make it past censors and into bookstores in smaller, marginal republics like Lithuania -as if the policies that werc strongly implemented in Moscow petered out once they reached the smaller urban centres.
l8 See Nora Levin's two-tome history of The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 for a good example of this.
l9 The closing down of synagogues and the prohibition against importing matzos are ways in which the Jews of the Soviet Union were persecuted. That said, the Catholic Church in Lithuania underwent similar persecution. Churches were closed and used as rnuseums of atheism, sculpture studios, and for storage. Many priests were imprisoned, sent to labour camps in Sibena and assassinated. Thus, closing of synagogues and the banning of matzos may in fact corne under a larger, more general policy of persecution of religious institutions and practices, rather than a specificaiiy anfiSemitic one. It is true, however, that the Soviets did have a very clear and official anti-Zionist policy, and this was often expressed in extremely offensive and antiSemitic ways. 135 When Meras went to Moscow, in hope of publishing a Russian translation of Menulio savaite in the journal Iunosti ("Youth), he encountered the full heat of Soviet censorship:
Ga1 a3 ir pats nieko nenuskriaudiiau tik todel, kad jokios karjeros partijoje nei
RaSytoju q'ungoje man padaryti neteko. Vèlesniais laikais isvengiau didelio
kompromiso. Kai dviejy rnilijony tiraiu Maskvoje isleidiiamas turnalas
'Junostj' parengè spaudai mania 'Menulio savaité." ISkèlq qlygq, kad
pasiraSyCiau laiSb prie5 sionizmg. Atsisakiau. Tai jau ncbuvo didelis
Zygdarbis. Nuoimüs laikai buvo praejq. Galejo suilugdyti tik kaip ra5ytojg.
(Meras qtd. in Zingeris, "Vilnius -Tel Avivas - Vilnius" 2)
Perhaps 1 mysclf didn't hann anyonç only because 1 didn't happen to build a
career for myself in either the Party or the Writers' Union. In later years 1
managed to avoid substantial compromise when the journal IlJwhich had
a circulation of two million, prepared my Menulio savaite for publication. The
condition for publication was that 1 put my signature on a letter denouncing
Zionism. 1 refused. At that tirne, this was no longer such a heroic gesture. The
fierce times were past. They could only destroy you as a writer.
Although the censors' criteria appear to have differed somewhat from republic to republic, it is possible to block out general guidelines as to appropriate representation of the Holocaust by considering the Yiddish monthly published from 1961-1991, Sovietish heymland (Soviet
Homeland). This publication contained material on the Holocaust - stories, poems, memoirs, factual information - and the publishing initiative was part of Krushchev's campaign to 136 refute Western charges of anti-Semitism. The main themes of the journal, which served a didactic purpose, and which can be used as a template for general Soviet guidelines regarding the representation of the Holocaust, were as follows: 1) gentiIes frequently saved Jews in occupied territories; 2) Jews who resisted did so for universal, not parochial, reasons; 3) there was much cooperation among al1 nationalities againsi the Nazis (texts were to illustrate druzhba narodov,20 or friendship among the peoples); 4) the only collaborators with the Nazis were fascists, and nearty al1 of them now live (and are rapidly aging) in the West (Gitelman
25). Resistance to the Holocaust was to be portrayed as a general stmggle against fascism.
Collaborators were to be portrayed as ideologically deformed, and iheir delormation was tri be portrayed as a direct result of bourgeois nationalism. Coilaboration was to be portrayed unquestionably as the exception rather than the rule, and collaborators as the marginal, misguided refuse of society. Tomas Venclova sums up what was permitted to exist under the
Soviets in the following succinct way:
In the USSR, and in many other countries, as we know, there is a system of
prohibitions on certain words and tem, on certain phrases, and on entire
(almost all) paris of reality. It is considered not only impermissible but simply
indecent to print certain combinations of graphemes, words, or ideas.
Everyone is obliged to know that these combinations are offensive to peoples
liberated fiom imperialist oppression, or insulting to the head of a friendly
state, or to the Soviet people, or simply to good taste. And what is not
Ironicaiiy, the press that published the Russian translation of~v~osioswas cailed "Dnrzhba narodov" (Meras, "Pavojingi IietuviSkai rahneio Zydy ra3ytojo Sachmatai" 16). 137 published somehow ceases to exist -in any case, it exists to a lesser degree; it
crosses over to the world of hadess phantoms [. . .].There is much [. . .] that
is improper and does not exist: rekigion and homosexuality, bribetaking and
hunger, Jews and nude girls, dissidents and immigrants, earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions, diseases and genitalia. Sozhenitsyn, Brodsky, and
Nabokov are offensive: ergo, they do not exist. Trotsky is offensive and nevcr
did exist. Stalin existed, but not very much. (Venclova, "Game" 34)
Similarly, collaborators may have existed in the Soviet Union, but not very rnuch, and not any more. A serious discussion of collaboration with the Nazis would have put the entire
Soviet project at risk. One could hardly speak of friendship among peoples, and of the projcct of the revoIution Ieading the people to a better future that transcended nationalism, if it was shown that the people were not only killing each other, but helping the enemy in its project of extermination. This problem was dealt with through a flat-out denial of the existence of collaboration among Soviet subjects. If there was collaboration, none of those people were left in the Soviet Union. They al1 ernigrated. Ami-Soviet émigrés wert: deemed fascist. Since al1 collaborators had fled with the Nazis, fearing prosecution for war crimes, there were no collaborators in the USSR. This evidently was not a Soviet problem, and therefore had no place in the discussions of the events of World War II."
Soviet Lithuania did, despite the denial of the presence of Nazi coiiaborators in the USSR, prosecute and convict war criminais. When, in 1991, newly independent Lithuania pardoned approximately a thousand of its citizens who had been convicted under the Soviets of Nazi war crimes, Jewish and Israeli groups protested immediately. In October of the same year, the Lithuanian govenunent modified its position and suspended the pardons. (Gitelman 32-33) 138 The Communal Text
Ehrenburg's text, it is clear right from the beginning, is never really his. The text of
The Black Book is a site of constant compromise and it is always a communal endeavour.
Each word is weighed, debated, its political appropriateness evaluated. The numerous versions of the text attest to its instability. The Black Book, it seems, is an idca or a pnnciple, rather than a text. And if there is no bue' Black Book, the same can be said of Mènulio savaite. Meras's texts too are sites of constant negotiation, adapting to each new set of categories that define what is appropriate, correct and publishable.
In Toward a Medieval Poetics, Paul Zumthor addresses two questions that conccrn me here: 1) What is the status of authorship in a text that has passed through numerous hands? 2) How should we consider question of authenticity in the rnulti-version text?
Zumthor takes the exarnple of French medieval poetry, an oral tradition, as his starting point.
Authorship, he argues, is a non-concept in the medieval period. The author is constructed by his or her text: "the poet is situated in his language, not the other way around" (44). As such.
the poet does not own his text, rather the text owns him: "In the early period, pre-1100, the very notion of authorship seerns to disappear [. . .].Authorship at this date impiies
continuation, not invention" (43). So the authors of the rnedieval poe try that Zumthor treats
in his study are those who sine, recite, add, change and remove text. 'Authors' are those who
encounter the text along its way. In a sense, it is the editorial community that owns the text:
in a communal process texts are communal property. Here too, authors are stone-carriers,
each of whom holds his or her own version of the text.
Meras's Soviet-era texts, by his own admission, had always been compromised for 139 the censors. In a 1996 newspaper interview he tells of adding pieces of text, what Tomas
Venclova has called 'lightening rods' ("Game of the Soviet Censor" 39, to his novel
Striptizas (Striptease) in order to appease censors:
Ne, kupiüq nebuvo. Buvo net atvirEiai. Ai pridéjau prologq ir epilogq [. .
.]. Vèliau viena recenzija kaikokiu büdu man pateko i rankas ir ten buvo
parasyta, kad romanas antisocialinis, antiistorinis, ir visoks anti [. . .]. O
prologas ir epilogas, kuriuos a5 pridèjau, ir romanas pasidaré tarsi bü~kokio
paryiieCio ufraSai. Tai romanui ne kiek nepakenke, atvirkxiai - atsirado tarsi
koks drabuiis, kurio tao. (Meras, "RaSytojas 1. Meras: 'Kalba yra tavo
No, there were no cuts. In faci, it was quite the opposite. 1 added a prologue
and epilogue [. . . 1. Later, 1 came across a review which said that the novel
was antisocial, anti-historical and al1 kinds of other 'antis'[. . .]. But the
prologue and epilogue thai I had added made the novel into something
resembling a Parisian's notebook. So it wasn't detrimental to the novel at all,
on the contrary - it was as if a piece of dothing that had been missing had
suddenly appeared.
Meras's texts are not solely his. Rather, tike ail texts of minor literature, they have belonged from the very beginning to the editotial (and, in this case, censonal) community of Lithuania.
His texts, like the medieval poetry that Zumthor treats, change with each appearance and with each translation. We have already seen that the English translation of Lv~iosiosdiffers from 140 the 'original' 1968 Lithuanian version of the novel. The Soviet Russian translations of
Meras's novels also differed: "Ruq skaitytojas Icchokq Meq atrado 7-ojo deSimtmetio viduryje, kai iS lietuviy kalbos buvo iSversti (su didelemis kupiüromis) du jo romanai -
'Lygiosios trunka akimirkq' ir 'Ant ko laikosi pasaulis"' ' Russian readers discovered
Icchokas Meras in the mid-1970s' when his two novels Ugiosios trunka akimirb and Ant ko laikosi uasaulis were translated (with substantial cuts) irom Lithuanian' (GoldSteinas in his preamble to an interview with Meras, "Pavojingi" 13). Three decades later, these two novels reappeared "without cuts" (13).
Each pair of hands through which the text passes leaves its mark: words are smudged, crossed out, pages go missing. Meras's texts are what Zumthor calls rnultiform. They are fundamentally unstable, always in a state of mouvance: a concept analogous to Deleuze and
Guattari's notion of continual becoming. With a multiform text, or a text in mouvance, there is no original, no authentic text: "Each version of a text, as it adopts a new forni, should in theory be treated as a means of adapting the text to a new function" (Zumthor 47). Meras's texts change in response to political circumstances that require his texts to adapt: a prologue and rpilogue are added to Stripti~as;~'corrections' are made for a Soviet Russian language version of Lv~iosios;collaborator testimony is removed irom Menulio savaite; the word baltaraistis is changed to policininkas in the postSoviet Lithuanian version of Lveiosios
None of these versions is the real, original, authentic text, and as such we cannot believe an author, publisher, or journaiist (i.e. GoldSteinas in the above citation) whcn she tells us that
" "Totalitarian censorship is never lirnited to just crossing things out; sooner or later the writer wiU be asked to add something. We can recognize the decent writers in Eastern Europe first by the fact that they try to add anything" (Venclova, "Game" 34). 141 the authentic, 'uncut' version of one of his or her novel has haUy appeared. Authenticity
(like The Black Book) is just an idea.
Work vs. Text
In his discussion of the problem of versions, Zumthor emphasizes that medieval poetry is part of an oral tradition. It is this oral tradition, and the inscription of it, that accounts for differing versions of a work.= The text, he says, is an easily deformed trace of the work. The work is ephemeral, a mythically original text, and an idea: "The work is fundamentally unstabie. Properly speaking it has no end; il rnercly accepts to corne to an end, at a given point, for whatever reasons. The work exists outside and hierarchically above its textual manifestationsy'(47-48). Zumthor gives the example of the work: Song of Roland vs. the texts: Songs of Roland. His insistence on the orai character of medieval poetry is important and right in the context the tradition of his discipline (49), but his framework functions for twentieth-century written (as opposed to oral) texts as well. Thus, we can think of Meras's novels in the same way, opposing the work: MenuIio savaité (this is the ephemeral idea of Menulio savaitè) vs. the texts: Menulio savaitels) and Ties eatves iibintu
(aisl (these are ils various concrete manifestations). It is an equally useful way of thinking about The Black Book: The Black Book as work (again, the idea of The Black Book), and the
23 "It is writing that explains and justifies the text's pluridimensional aspect, which contrasts with the linearity of speech. It also accounts for the ambiguous nature of its historicity. The text negates individual history exactly to that extent to which the spoken word, by contrast, affwand apparently creates it. It is superimposed on history, acting toward it as a broken mirror in which history's successive and, therefore, from this point of view, accidental and referential meanings are refiected as shattered fragments. Writing creates an autonomous space, a web of figures in which the author's and receiver's times mingie in a continuous decoding of something that both transcends and engulfs them" (Zumthor 49). 142 various versions of The Black Book as texts. A work is fiuid, changing, growing and decaying (Zumthor 48), while a single text is merely one embodirnent of infinite possibility.
Just as Lveiosios is ody one version of the story of the Vilna ghetto, each version of Mènulio savaite is but one possible version of the work that is behind it. The work, then, is a
multipiicity: it is abstract and unreadable. We as readers only ever have texts, as there is no
uncut, unedited, authentic work that is an Icchokas Meras novel. There are only his texts.
Meras maintains that the changes to his texts never change their essence. We can see this
from the above quote, where he maintains that adding a prologuc and epilogue to thc tcxt
actualIy improved it. The author calls these changes made for the benefit of the censors a
"pudravimas" 'powdering' of the text:
"RaSiau tai, norejau. Nemelavau, taciau kai kuriais atvèjais mano vidinis
cenzorius zirzè."
Jis prisipaiino, kad kartais tekdavo kai kq pagraiinti ar subelninti,
taiiau tie 'papudravimai' kurinio esmes nekeisdavo [. . .].
"Cenzüra yra visada, - teige rasytojas. -Ji yra ir Siandien, reigkiasi ne
vien Glavlito, CK ar pernelyg uolaus redaktoriaus pavidalu. Ji reiSkiasi
patioje visuorneneje, dvasinêje terpéje. Al: ir Jiandien jauÇiu 4 netnaloniq
letenq ir visq lailq galvoju, O kq pasakys skaitytojas." (Meras qtd. in
MilkeviCiütè 19)
"1 wrote what 1 wanted to. 1 never lied, though on some occasions my inner
censor buzzed." 143 He admitted that sometimes he would edir the text to make it prettier
or more gentle, but those 'powderings' didn't change the essence of the work
[. . .].
'There's always censorship. - confirmed the author. - It exists today,
manifesting itseIf not only under the guise of Glavlit, the Centrai Cornmittee
or an overly diligent editor. It manifests itself in society, in the spiritual
sphere. Even today 1 feel that unpleasant paw and continually think to myself
'and what will the reader say?'
Censorship has always existed, and still exists, says this author. The important thing is that the essence of a text remains recognizable, even through the cosmetics applied by the hand of the (internalu or external) censor. Meras, then, is a true believer in the work vs. the text. The work is untouchable, uncorruptable, while texts will be always already impert'cct attempts at the expression of the work, in which the essential kernel that is the work is nevertheless
24 Venclova writes on the interna1 censor: "It has been remarked that every member of the official press has a kind of inner censor, a Freudian superego as it were, who dictates what 'passes' and 'doesn't pass.' This superego makes the work of further censors easier -an editor of a journal, a Glaviit employee, the head of the ideological department. But alrnost every writer -exceptions are rare and belong in the realm of complete pathology - not only has a censor at work in his subconscious but also has its opponent -a seductive demon-jester, an obscene and incorrigible creature who eternaiiy rebels against the censor. This creature [which Venclova caiis an id in the paragraph that follows] tries to push the lirnits of what is acceptable, to Say what usuaiiy would not 'pass,' and to be silent (or else mumble something nonsensical) when expressions of faithfulness and loyalty are called for" ("Game" 34). GaveIis continues: "Essentially, al1 censorship in this system is intenal. This is the most important achievement of the system. The writer is forced to carry out al1 the cuts himself. He is not casttated by force[,] but is forced to castrate himself, by his own hand, beiieving al1 the while that once castrated he WUstiii be able to sing as a bas [. . .].In Lithuania, this system was so weii entrenched that professional censors were complaining that there was nothing leA to cut" (95). recognizable.
Missing Pages
Anyone who has tried to piece together an account of what happened in Lithuania during World War II will find him- or herself faced with gaping holes, silences and absences.
In the catalogue of the Maivydas National Library in Vilnius, there is no subject heading
"ghetto," or "Holocaust," or even "catastrophe" (the Soviet term for the Holocaust).
Documents listed in the card catalogue under "Ministry of Jewish Affairs Publications, 1941-
42" are nowhere to be found, and no mechanisms are in place to tind them. In the sumrner of
2000 the Centre for the Study of the Lithuanian Genocide, located on Didiioji Street in the
old tom, literally les than five hundred metres away from where the first Jewish ghetto's
walls were erected, had not yet published any books about the Vilna ghetto. It rnainly
pubtishes rnaterial on the rnass Soviet deportations, a series of incidents now referred to (at
best, provocatively; at worst outrageously) as the 'Lithuanian genocide,' while it breathes
nothing of the genocide that happened just up the Street. It rnust be said that a perusal of the
'other' side is frustrating as well. Litvak accounis of World War II in Lithuania often begin
only with the Nazi occupation, and thus skip over the mas deportations of the first Soviet
occupation in 1940 (an event, which is arguably not a genocide per se, but which
nevertheless cannot be omitted from an account of that place at that time).25 Here too, entire
sections of the story are missing, pages ripped out.
Let us now go back very briefly to the story of The Black Book for a textual exarnple
25 An exception to this is Yaffa Eliach's very impressive comprehensive account of shtetl life in Eishyshok (EiSiSkes). Eliach's study begins with the founding of Eishyshok in 980, and ends with 'liberation' in 1944. 145 of such missing pages. We have seen that the story of The Biack Book begins and ends (if we want to see its 1995 Russian language publication as such) in Vilnius. The standard English version of this text has been the 1981 version published by the Holocaust Library in New
York. It is a text that was based on the manuscript that the (Litvak) poet Sutzkever had brought to Yad Vashem in Israel in 1965.26Interestingly, in this version, the "Lithuania" section was lost (or removed) and its place in the table of contents had been carefully crossed out. This would seom to indicate that this section was removed before it left the USSR, possibly by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Cornmittee. The 1981 New Yark edition includes the
"Lithuania" section in its table otcontents, but the section itself remains absent. A footnote explains that it was never found. The "Lithuania" section finaily reappeared in the Russian version published in Vilnius in 1993. Both this version and its French translation (1995) contain the section on Lithuania that had been missing from earlier versions. This (final?) text was put together on the basis of a manuscript found in Ilya Ehrenburg's personal archive after his death.
Lithuanians have a reputation among Jewish communities for being exemplary in their denial and forgetting of their own role in the annihilation of their country's Jewish community. tt is certain that this is partly a result of Soviet historiography which, as we have seen, downplayed local collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces. In part, this is also a result of an emigrê community's fixation on the los of a homeland and on the mass Soviet deportations to Siberia as symbolic of the great injustice done to it. The silence of the
16 It had been sent to Eretz-Israel in 1946 (Solomon Tsiriulnikov was the keeper of the Israeli manuscript). This manuscript contained 36 photographs found among the belongings of captured and dead Germans. 146 Lithuanians, both in emigration and those who remained under the Soviets, must also be seen, in part, to stem from anti-Semitism and guitty consciences as well. The result of this forgetting and ihis silence has been a systematic removal of pages €rom history books and the effacement of an entire community. We see from the example of The Black Book that this process began as early as the 1940s. Now, more than fifty years later, sorne of those pages are finding their way back into books. And although there is still na subject heading "ghetto" in the national library, Vilna ghetto memoirs and journals, such as those of Grigorijus (HirSas)
Suras (1997) have begun to appear in Lithuanian. That said, the mernoir of Aleksandras
Lileikis (a Lithuanian-American Bmigcé who was stripped of American citizenship and threatened with extradition - in the end he went of his own accord - to Lithuania for Nazi war crimes in 1996) has recently appeared in print as well, and in the spring of 2000, his book could be bought in any bookstore alongside Lithuanian partisan2' memoirs and the poet
Sigitas Geda's anthology of Lithuanian poetry about the Holocaust (Mirtis. reCitatwas ir melvnas drueelis), which includes a poem by Tomas Venclova ("Ghetto") and a translation of Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). Lileikis's Pm(In the
Footurints of Awakened Time) is an attempt to answer to the accusations made against him.
27 Lithuanian partisan memoirs are an extremely problernatic genre. In the Vilnius region during World War II, Lithuanian partisan groups existed alongside Polish partisan groups (the Armia kraiowa), Soviet (by and large Russian) partisan gcoups and Jewish partisan groups, some of which eventuaily joined forces with Soviet partisans. The Lithuanian partisan groups are often labeiied 'fascist groups' in Litvak memoirs and historical accounts. For more on the differing interpretations of history and of the roles of specific partisan groups, see Sara Shner-Neshamit's "Jewish-Lithuanian Relations during World War II: History and Rhetoric" in Zvi GiteIman's Bitter Leeacv. Since 1990 there has been an explosion of Lithuanian partisan memoirs appearing in ptint. One example of such a memoù is Stasys Gviidys's Laisvés troikimo kaina (The Price of Thirstine for Freedom). 147 Lithuanians had nothing against the Jews, he writes, it was the Poles we hated. No Jews were killed by local populations in the countryside, and if they were, it was the Poles, the hia kraiowa, that did it (Lileikis 62-68). As for the ghetto, in his brief discussion of it, Lileikis
(who was the head of secret police in the Vilnius region under the Nazis) denies being
involved in its administration, and suggests that if anyone is to blarne for the annihilation of
Vilnius's Jewish cornmunity "tad ir vaiko protas gali suprasti" 'even a child's mind can
understand' the "elernentariij tieq" 'elernentary truth' (123) that the Jews thernselves were to
blame (see the note below for the full text of Lileikis's the si^).^^ It would be easy to dismiss
this book as a naïve and hateful piece of writing that should not be granted serious
consideration. The problem is Lileikis's allies: a nurnber of well-respected individuals frorn
both Lithuania and the emigré community (Professor Robertas Grigas and Dr. Adolfas
"Ty me4 [1994] rugséjo 23 dienq sukako 50 rnetq nuo Vilniaus iydy geto Iikvidavimo. Ta diena - didi iydv tautos nelaime, neapsakoma tragedija visai Lietuvai. Bet su iydy tragedija ad nieko nesu susijqs? Juk kiekvienas iydas, rnanau, iino Sios kruvinos dienos tikrqsias prieiastis. Ir nereikia büti mokslininku, kad suprastum elementariq tiesq - Lileikis nei steigé getq, nei iji vare Zydus ar juos Saudé. Zydy geto virSininkas buvo iydas, jo pagalbininkai bei iydy geto policininkai - irgi iydai, iydo virsininko parinkti. Ir tie Eydai vykde vokieeiq valiq. Geto vyresniiljq tarybq taip pat sudare iydai. Tad ir vaiko protas gali suprasti, kas kaltas del to, jog buvo nuiudyti niekuo nekalti Vilniaus Zmones, ivyko iii didiiulê nelaime" (Lileikis 123).
'September 23 of that year [1994] was the 50' anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius. That day was a great misfortune for the Jewish people, and an indescribable tragedy for al1 of Lithuania. But did 1 have any connection to the tragedy of the Jews? 1 think every Jew knows the tnie reasons behind that bloody day. And you don't have to be an academic to understand the elementary truth - Lileikis neither established the ghetto, nor herded the lews there or shot them. The head of the ghetto was a Jew, his helpers and the Jewish ghetto police - they were also Jews, chosen by the Jewish boss. And those Jews implemented the wishes of the Gemans. The ghetto's council of elders was also made up of Jews. So even a child's mind can understand who is to blame for the fact that innocent people of Vilnius were murdered, and that this great misfortune took place.' 148 DamuSis are two exampies) lend their support to his account through the inclusion of their letters and interviews as an appendix to the book. Although 1 have no! ïormulated any conclusions as to Liieikis's guilt or innocence (he is accused of kiliing 40,000 people), surely the paragraph in which he suggests that the Vilna Jews themselves are to blame for their own annihilation should have been enough for those who have lent their names to this memoir to question their decision to do sol and to decide against it. The example of Lileikis shows how far apart the NOnarratives continue to bel and how many pages are still missing from the
Lithuanian narrative.
More Missing Pages
The missing pages in the larger narrative of the Holocaust in Lithuania (as told by
Lithuanians) is mirroted in Ménulio savaite. The second stage of editing of the novel resulted in its transformation into a completely new text entitled Ties patves iibintu. This editing process is characterized by the removal of entire pages and sections of the Soviet novel. The
186-page Menulio savaite was reincarnated in 1998 as a much leaner 58-page document. A total of 128 pages had been ripped out. Like The Black Book. Menulio savait6 is full of missing pages. Its final incarnation, Ties ~atveskibintu, is a negative text: a text defined by what has been removed, more so than by what remains. Books were an important refuge for those in and on the periphery of the historical Vilna ghetto: Simaite, we know Gom her letters, longed to escape into her books. Inside the ghetto, the library was a central place of refuge for its residents. In his account of the year's work in the ghetto library, the Librarian
Herman Knik marveiled at the immediate rise in the number of subscribers (which had nsen
from 2,000 to more than 4,000 in 1940-41 ["Library and Reading Room" 1721) that the 149 library began to service once the ghetto had been implemented. Kruk understood the importance of the library for the people of the ghetto, calling the effect of reading on them a
"bibliopsychological relief' (171). The miracle of the book, he wrote, is that it:
became a narcotic, a means of escape.
A human being can endure hunger. poverty, pain, and suitering, but he
cannot tolerate isolation. Then, more than in normal times, the attraction of
books and reading is almost indescribable.
In the ghetto, each individual is allotted scarcely 70 square centimeters
[. . .j. Everything is heaped onto the tloor, without a table or a chair. The
house is like a gigantic beehive. Still, you lie down, doubled up on your
meager possessions, and you ingest the narcotic - the book. The new ghetto
inhabitant thus clings to the little bit of what remained from before. Books
carried him away, over the ghetto walls and into the world. A reader could
thus tear himself away from his oppressive isolation and in his mind be
reunited with Iife, with his stolen freedom. ("Library and Reading Room"
193)
Kruk's likening of the attachment to books to the use of narcotics is supported by the tact that
readership rose with each "Action" in the ghetto, when thousands of people would be
rounded up and taken to Ponar to be shot. Kruk writes:
On 1 October, Yom Kippur, about 3,000 people were extracted from various
hiding places and taken out of the Vina ghetto, and already on 2 October
there were gigantic queues of readers waiting for a book. That same day, 390 150 books were circuiated by the library. On the third and fourth, masses of people
were removed Gom Ghetto No. 2. The tension in Ghetto No. 1 was beyond
description, but dready on the fifth no fewer than 421 books were circulated.
(193)
Reading, like a narcotic! numbed the ghetto readers allowing them to escape the terror that sunounded them. Kruk points out that readers do not read "higher quality books" (he gives the texts of Flaubert and Dostoevsky as examples of these), instead they read "light fiction, mysteries, and semi-trashy books" (193), which distract rather than instruct. As with
Simaite's preserving of books as well as people in her library, the paraIlel between books and their readers can be found in Kruk's discussion of his library as well: "Each Action," he writes, "left its legacy. Along with the 'borrowed' readers, the books that had been lent to them also departed. Fewcr peopie remained in the ghetto, and fewer books as well" (193).
Chiidren were among the ghetto library's most devoted patrons, displaying "the most insistent need to exchange their books frequentiy" (Kruk,"Library and the Reading Roorn"
197). The frequent exchange of books that transported the children to fantastic worlds (that of
The Adventures of Tom Sawver and of Yiddish translations of the novels of Jules Verne
[Abramowicz 167)) took its toU on the already ancient volumes. Kruk's assistant, Dina
Abramowicz, described the condition of these much-loved books:
the text was hardly legible on the greasy pages, volumes where dozens of
pages were missing at the beginning and at the end, and probably no less in
the middle, bound and rebound again and again so that the margin was
nonexistent and the beginning of the line disappeared somewhere deep in the 151 spine of the book - in short invalids of books that had deserved to be retired a
long time ago. (168)
In both Menulio savaite and Ties eatves iibintii, an unnamed boy (simply called j& or 'he') reads to his young friend from such a tattered copy of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels inside the monastery wall. The first passage he reads tells of Gulliver in Brobdingnag (a place of giants), then, in accordance with the young girl's wishes for "him," Gulliver, "to be big, big. . ." (Mènulio savaite 1971: 19), the boy reads about Gulliver in Lilliput. He reads until he is stopped by missing pages: " - ISplegti keli lapai, -tare jis. - Bet aS vistiek skaitysiu toliau. . . - Skaityk, skaityk, - sutiko jinai" "'There are a few pages tom out," he said. "But
1'11 keep reading anyway." "Read, read," she agreed' (Mènulio savaite 1971: 21). This
passage is reproduced in Ties eatvés iibintu, but this tirne even more pages are missing from
the boy's copy of Swift's text than belore. In this latter version the boy reads less tex1 than he
did in Mènulio savait& he stops reading twenty lines eariier, and resumes reading several
pages later (compare Menulio savaite 1971: 20-3 with Ties gatvés iibintu 1998: 278-79).
In choosing Gulliver's Travels as an intertext, Meras writes the instability of his own
text - what Zumthor calls mouvance - into it. The gesture to Swift is a curious one. While
writing in the language of the other, Meras further 'others' his text by citing the other's other
(that is, the Lithuanian reader's Western, anglophone other) - an eighteenth-century Anglo-
Irish writer who, systematicaliy played with the censors in his texts. We have seen that
Meras's texts disintegrate over time through the ghettoization of unwanted passages. This
disintegration is unmarked and wiU go unnoticed by the less curious reader who feels no med
to compare versions. Swift's texts, on the contrary, mark a misshg section of a manuscript 152 with eilipses (Tale of a Tub 38) and unveii the forces at play in negotiations between censors, authors and editors. An advertisement on the first page of Gulliver's Travels rcads:
We are assured, that the Copy sent to the Bookseller in London, was a
Transcript of the Original, which Original being in the Possession of a very
worthy Gentleman in London, and a most intimate Friend of the Authors; after
he had bought the Book in Sheets, and compared it with the Originals, bound
it up with blank Leaves, and made those Corrections, which the Reader will
find in our Edition. For, the same Gentleman did us the Favour to let us
transcribe his Corrections. (xv)
In Menulio savaitè, what rules the outside world comes to bear on the inner workings of the fictional world of the text. In Meras's world, Swift's text continues to disintegrate. It is systematically fragmented and re-shuffled in its reproduction in both published versions of
Meras's novel. The boy starts reading to the girl at page 81-82 (Part II, Chapter 1) and then skips backward seventy pages to the first chapter of Part 1, "A Voyage to Lilliput." Not only are entire pages rnissing, as the boy points out to his young friend, but single lines as well as
entire paragraphs fa11 away as he read~.~~Whether Swift's text is corrupted from inside the
29 Mènulio savait4 1 Ties -~atvés Zbintu truncates Swift's text in the following way. Unmarked text indicates what is included in both published versions, the bold text indicates that which has been cut only from Ties natvés iibintu, but remains in Mènulio savaite, while bold and underlined text has been cut irom both versions (1998: 278-79; 1971: 20-22). The chiidren read from a Lithuanian translation of Swift's text.
"It seems that upon the fust Moment 1 was discovered sleeping on the Ground after my Landing, the Emperor had early notice of it by an Express; and determined in Cound that 1 should be tyed in the Mamer 1 have related (which was done in the Night while 1 slept) that Plenty of Meat and Dnnk should be sent to me, and a Machine prepared to carry me to the Capitai City. 153 text (namely, that the boy is abbreviating the text as he reads), or whether it is corrupted from outside (namely, that Meras, the author is tailoring the text to his purposes) is unclear. Either way, the already cramped space of minor literature is closing in here - though, unlike the removal of 'Sovietalia' in Lviziosios, here the motivation appears to be for aesthetic reasons, rather than political discomfort. GuUiver's Trzvels is metafictional in that it writes the writing process into the tex[: Gulliver, the 'author' of the travelogue, explains in his text thai he did not omit a single detail of his voyage, and at the beginning of the text (through the publisher) he asks the reader's pardon for whai rnay seem like a tedious and overly meticuious account, but assures us that much has been edited out, and that what's left is indeed necessary:
I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwehg on these and ihe Iike
Particulars; which however insignilicant they might appear to grovelling
vulgar Minds, yet will certainly help a Philosopher to enlarge his Thoughts
and Imagination, and apply them to the Benefit of publick as private Life [. .
.].But the whoie Scene of this voyage made so strong an impression on my
Mind, and is so deeply fixed in my Memory, that in cornmitting it to Paper, 1
This Resolution perhaps may appear very bold and dangemuq and I am confident would not be imitated by any Prince in Europe on the Iike Occasion; however, in my Opinion it was extremely prudent as well as Generous. pp- sbould cerîainlv have awakened with the iirst Sense of Smart. which nùnbt so far have rauzed mv Rane and Streantb.- os to eaable me to break the SMam wherewitb 1was tved: after which, as îhev were not able to make Resistance. so thev could exwct no Mem 1. . .lm 1 had sent so many Memorials and Petitions for my Liberty, that his Majesty at length mentioned the Matter first in Cabinet, and then in full Coundi [. . ,1" (Swift, Gulliver's Travels 12-30). 154 did not omit one material Circumstance: However, upon a strict Review, 1
blotted out several Passages of less Moment which were in my first Copy, for
fear of being censured as tedious and trifling, whereof Traveliers are often,
perhaps without Justice accused. (91)
Swift's narrator continualiy points to textual incompleteness, fragmentation and directs accusations at block-headcd editors for the corruption and unauthorized alteration of his texts which were under constant smtiny by censors. The incompleteness of Swift's text is then seized upon by Meras and his narrators in order to gesture toward the eternal incompleteness
(or continual becoming) of Meras's own texts. Thus, several important things are happening in Meras's recycling of Swift's text: first of all, in skipping over entire lines and pages of
Guliiver's account, the implied author or the boy (depending on who's doing the editing) disregards the traveller's request for the reader to trust him that every detail is necessary. Not only does this authorlreader of or in Menulio savait6 not respect the integrity of
Swift's/Gulliver's text, but its sequence is not maintained either. Sequence and omissions, as the young girl tells us, don? matter. Keep reading, she says. In Meras's fictional (and 'real') worlds texts are fluid. They can be changed, fraymented and utilized (or manipulated) by anyone for any purpose, and Meras is more aware of this than most. He knows that the writing of the text is a constant negotiation with censors, both interna1 and extemal, officia1 and unofficial. Censors mould a text into a iorm that is appropriate for its intended audience and that will deliver the desired message. Censors work with only the audience in mind.
Censorship, therefore is govemed by consumption -and censorship is ail about making a consumer text. Playing with censorship, on the other hand, is aii about the post-consumer 155 text. The post-consumer text writes its own censorship. In gesturing to Swift within the fictional worici of Menulio savaite; Meras brings the forces that govern the text outside of it into it. Swift plays with the censors, and Meras plays with Swift. Meras reduces, re-uses and recycles not only his own texts, but those of others as welLMTiesnatvts iibintu is a post- consumer product made of one hundred percent recycled material.
Tbe Post-consumer Text
A post-consumer text is a text that uses recycled matenal. It is a text that appears again and again in a slightly altered form, always with more or les the same ingredients. The siight changes that do occur, occur during the recycling process, as certain components are
boilcd away, strained off or added to the mixture. A post-consumer text is one that gocs
beyond the consumer, beyond the reader. Ties ~atvèsiibintu is a tcxt that is not for the
ceader, but for the writer. The opposite is tme of Lv~iosios,which is a text that asks only
"what will the readec say" and which is written with only the consumer in mind. This most
recent incarnation of Menulio savaitè is designated as a childish text by the author. It is
childish not only because al1 compiicated factors have been boiled off and strained away, but
it is childish because it loves repetition and to act and re-act stories out for itself beforc a
mirror.
A post-consumer text is one that writes its own censorship; and in doing so, subverts
the process of censorship by unveiling it (as Swift does in his advertisement), incorporating it
into itself (as Meras incorporates Swift) or by marking its presence over top of the printed
Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince is recycled in Menulio savaitè as weii. 1 have alceady mentioned the use of Newsweek. The Voice of America radio btoadcasts and TASS news reports in the Soviet version of ~enuliosavaite. 156 word. A good example of the latter is Reza Baraheni's Persian noveiia What Hau~enedAlter
the Wedding? Baraheni, who, like Meras, writes in the language of the other (he is ethnically
Turkish, but writes in Persian), has sparred with Iranian censors for decades. 11,000 copies of
his noveiia, What Hauuened After the Weddine?, alter having gone through an initial review
by the censors, were printed. A second read of the newly printed novella proved
unsatisfactory. New passages were earmarked for removal. The printer, understandably
dismayed at the prospect of getting rid of so many newly printed signatures, asked what he
was meant to do - bIack out the offensive passages? He was told he could do anything he
wanted, as long as the passages were unreadable. The result was beautiful and embarrassing
(for the regime) (see Appendix 24). The censored passages were crossed out with curly, lace-
like ribbons. The regime ordered the printer immediately to destroy al1 copies of the book.
The author managed to get a few copies for himself of the post-consumer text that never quite
made it into the consumer's hands.
Menulio savait&connects through flight lines to two different ghettos: on the one
hand, it connects to the literary and historical Vilna ghetto, and on the other, to the ghetto that
is Meras's literary archive. Meras's Menuiio savait&illustrates, perhaps better than any other
of his texts, not only the continual becoming that is characteristic of rninor literature, but also
its politicization. No utterance is neutral here: even the gesture toward Swift and the
(seemingly merely aesthetic) decision to skip over passages in Gulliver's Traveb reflects
back on Meras's own game with his various censors. Flight lines lead out of his text, and
some come back together in his archive. Thus far, 1have caiied this meeting place a ghetto,
but one could easily think of it as a junction as weii. Chapter Four wiU consider the city of 157
Strasbourg as such in the context of Djebar's novel Les nuits de Strasboure- (Strasbourg Chapter Four
Strasbourg: Erotic Nights at the Junction
"France, ô France, dans ce seul mot, y aurait4 ma souffrance?" (Djebar, Les
nuits de Strasbourg 223).
Les nuits de Strasbourg (Strasbour~Ni~hts) is an interrupted novel. Djebar spent three months in Strasbourg in 1993, which is where and when Les nuits de Strasbourg was begun; and it was finished in 1997 in Louisiana, having been interrupted by the massacres in
Algeria and the author's need to write two texts in rcaction to the violence there, namely Lç blanc de I'Algkrie (The White of Aleeria) and Oran. langue morte (Oran.).
By virtue of its interruption, this novel is a stuttering tcxt: it is a text punctuated by breaths and breaks, "the disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the connections, reflexive"
(Deleuze, Essavs 110). When Deleuze says that language stutters, he means that it resonates with new possibility. The stuttering that happened in the process of writing Les nuits de
Strasbourg ruptured Djebar's text, and sent it in a new direction: the reconciliation that the author had achieved with her language of expression - what 1 have called her literary conversion - is put in question in this novel. Les nuits de Strasbourg is a text deeply ambivalent in ifs relationship to language: the old dilemrna of how to write in the language of the enemy resurfaces here. Aithough the narrative is set in 1989 (a year after mass demonstrations and civilian clashes with the rnilitary began in Aigeria, but several years before the terror erupted there), the text gestures toward the impending fratricide in Algeria
158 159 through its examination of a srnaIl suburban theatre troupe's production of Antigone. Les nuits de Strasbourg is a text about the attempt to become a nomad, and leave one's past behind. It is a conhsed text whose charactecs wade through the contradictions of inheritanct: and history, as they re-evaluate (and in some cases, over-value) their relationships to language, temtory, and origins. Les nuits de Strasbourg provides a striking contrast Io two tex& that intempted it, Le blanc de 1'Aleérie- and Oran. langue morte, which explicitly write around and against the terror in Algena and the deaths of loved ones. In Les nuits de
Strasbourg Djebar writes erotic acts in erotic language: "ma seule réaction à l'actualiti sanglante était d'écrire de plus longues pages encore sur les neufs nuits d'amour imaginées à
Strasbourg! Mon imagination, disons-le maintenant, était, en quelque sorte, pure thérapie!"
'my only reaction to the bloody reality was to write even longer pages on the nine imagined nights of love in Strasbourg! My imagination, let's say it now, was, in a way, pure therapy!'
(Ces voix 237).
In Chapter One 1 characterized Djebar's move beyond temtory, or into a territory ol writing, as a kind of literary globalism. Les nuits de Strasbourg, perhaps more than any other of her texts, is the product of such a movement, as it is a text that was begun in Strasbourg, f.inished in Louisiana, and reacting to events in Algeria. Djebar, herself, has in recent years become a international writer and an inteilectual nomad: at once always at home and always a stranger, wherever she Gnds herself writing and teaching. The city that provides the Ming for her novel is a city of passages: its German name, StraBburq, means ''city of streets," and
Djebar's novel uses this setting to tel the cnss-crossing stones of exiles and nomads:
ville-frontière, ville autrefois dite <
d'après son étymologie.
ViUe des passages, des passages de langue aussi, ville habitée par tant
d'écrivains, allemands depuis Goethe en passant par Büchner, puis dans notre
siècle, par Elias Canetti, et célébrée tout autant par tant de romantiques
français, les plus grands d'ailleurs, de Nerval i Victor Hugo . . . (Ces voix
234)
a border city, a city that was once called "free," and having oscillated so many
times between French authority, then German, then French, "the city of
streets," according to its etymology.
City of passages, passages of language too, city inhabited by so many
writers, Germans frorn Goethe on through Büchner, then in our century, to
Elias Canetti, and celebrated by so many French romantics, by the greatest of
them, irom Nerval to Victor Hugo . . .
The novel's setting or Strasbourg is sig~ficant:by virtue of its being a contested space,
Strasbourg effectively belongs to no one. It is a city without ownership, populated by exiles and nomads. It is ah,as Djebar points out, a city oi writers, and a city of books. Notable for iis multilingualism and for its status as a frontier city, the passing back and forth of
Strasbourg between France and Germany began in 1681, when the city was placed under the protection of Louis XIV. French ruie Iasted until 1871, when the Treaty of Frankfurt established the annexation of Strasbourg to Germany. The ioliowing year, many 161
Strasbourgeois left the city for France, and a great proportion of these refugees was rescttled in the young French coiony, Algeria. In 1918, Strasbourg was retumed to the French, and then re-invaded by the Nazi anny in June, 1939. This time, the entire city had been evacuated in the first days of September, ten months before the anival of the Germans, and it is with
this episode that Djebar's novel begins: the city is emptied of approximatety 150,000
inhabitants. Only 300 citizens remain to await the occupying forces, to keep the city's
electricity and gas running, and ta patrol it, once evacuated (Les nuits 12). The fleeing
citizens leave their pets and farm mimals behind; the zoo animals are let free (except the
lions and tigers, which have to be shot [33]), and the city becomcs theirs. It is this image of a
city left for cats and dogs to rule over while it awaits (human) occupation that gives birth to
Djebar's novel. The empty city becomes an empty page on which to inscribe her characters:
Voulant savoir quel jour extactement la langue allemande était revenue en 39-
40 à travers les soldats entrant dans la ville, j'apprends, étonnie, que
Strasbourg, les 2,3 et 4 septembre 1939, a été entièrement vidée de ses cent
cinquante miiie habitants.
Cette ville vide (sauf, il est vrai, pour les casernes pleines de soldats)
est restée ainsi jusqu'à la mi-juin 1940, au moment de l'entrée des troupes
ailemandes: soit largement plus de dix mois! [. . .]
Pour ma pan, c'est ce vide qui m'a fascinée. C'est grâce à ce vide que
j'ai pu faire vivre, à Strasbourg, mes personnages imaginaires. (Ces voix 235)
Wanting to hdout exactly what day the German language had returned in '39-'40 via the soldiers entering the city, 1 learn, surprised, that Strasbourg,
the 2*, 3rd,and 4ihof September, 1939, was completely emptied of its one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitanis.
This emptied city (except, it is true, for the barracks full of soldiers)
remained this way until midJune, 1940, when the German troops entered:
making it well over ten months! [. . .I
For my part, it was this emptiness that lascinated me. It is thanks to
this emptiness that 1 was able to make rny imaginary characters come to life in
Strasbourg.
This Strasbourg, left to the animals, is free once again. Neither German nor French, it is the historically free city of Strasbourg that provides the seiting for the comings and goings of the novel. The temporary cité libre of 1939 is filled with Lovers' stories fifty years later. The couples of the novel al1 cross linguistic and ethnic Srontiers, and their relationships, themselves, are linguistic passages: Thelja and François (between Algeria and France), Eve and Hans (between [Jewish] Algeria and Gennany), Jacqueline and Ali (again, betwcen
France and Algeria). At the centre of this constellation of lovers is a thirty-year-old art historian, Thelja, who is in the city to do research on the lost manuscript, entitled Hortus deliciarum (The Garden of Deliehts) of the Abesse Herrade de Landsberg of the twelfth century; to visit a childhood iriend, Eve; and to spend nine nights with her French lover. As
Strasbourg has a long history as a place of refuge -a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sixteenth century Strasbourg opened its doors to Jews, priests, land owners, and nobles fleeing the Refonnation - most of the novel's characters come from elsewhere (Eva, Thelja, 163
Touma, Hans, Djamila); others were born in Alsace and have returncd as adults (François,
Jacqueline). Most, too, are tleeing a past: Thelja has left a husband and young son in Algeria;
François is fleeing the memory of his recently deceased wife; Jacqueline is literally in hiding from her Algerian lover, Ni, who ultimateiy shoots her dead in a public square; Eve, an
Algerian Jew, has left her husband and chiId, and is now pregnant with a baby by her German lover, Hans, who commutes from Heidelberg over the French border to see her each weekend. Only Irma has unknown origins and, udike the others, is in search of her past. She is in search of her mère amère (bitter mother), a woman who saved many Alsatian Jews from death at the hands of the Nazis, and whose name (Delaporte) Irrna was given, in order to savc her, when her birth parents were taken to the Struthof concentration camp (264-66). Irma has become convinced that the story was made up by the bitter mother, Maïté Delaporte, in order to conceal Irma's illegitimate birth to her, and has been using French access-to-information taws to tcy to gain access both to documents and to the woman she believes to be her birth mother. Irma meets not only with one "mère" but two, if we are to include the mayor ("le maire") in the count. This "maire" is sweet, rather than bitter. As he counsels Irma to drop the pursuit of her bitter mother, his explanation produces a mornentary stuttering of language, reminiscent of that produced by Zingeris with his "bonne vovage." The mayor tells Inna:
Je vous avertis, ce sera dur avec elle . . . pour qu'eue vous reconnaisse comme
sa fille! . . . Je tiens à vous redire, parce que c'est la loi, que vous aurez
toujours loisir de continuer votre procédure, la demande de reconnaissance de
cette maternité! . . . Des parents juifs, emmenés au Struthof et tués, il y en a eu
hélas, malheureusement; il y en a eu trop! Mais aucun papier n'a été trouvé de cette filiation-là, pour vous . . . Le seul ternoin aurait ét6 Mme Maïté, eile ne
veut rien dire [. . .1. (264-65)
1 warn you, it will be diificult with her . . . to pet her to recognize you as her
daughter! . . . 1 must tell you again, because it's the law, that you will always
have the right to continue your procedure: the request for recognition of this
rnaternity! . . . Alas, there were sorne Jewish parents taken to Struthof and
killed, sadly; there were too rnany. But no paper was found testifying to this
filiation, for you . . . The only witness would have ken Mme Maïté, and she
doesn't want to Say anything [. . .].
The moment of stuttering that occurs here is with the word "Struthof." Located fifty kilometres from Strasbourg, at an altitude of 800 metres, Natzweiler-Struthof was the only
Nazi concentration camp on French soil. The camp is not widely known or written about, and at first glance the word ''Struthof' reads as an error -as a misspelling of "Stutthoî" - even though it is not. We can see in the name "Struthor' the combination of "Strasbourg" and
"Stutthof." In this way the iree city of Strasbourg meids together with the concentration camp, Stutthof. Strasbourg, for Djebar, is a city of contradictions: on the one hand, it is a city built on the tradition of refuge and heedom; on the other, it is a city of disappearances and persecution. The name Struthof contains within it this contradictory past, and it stutters in that there is a much larger history vibraîing within it. A similar bdof stuttering occurs in the ninth chapter of the novel, which is entitled "Alsagéne" (353). It is a neologism, or a stutter, upon which Irma Grst stumbles when she discovers that Karl has a much more 165 interesting past than she had ever imagined. He is an Alsatian pied noir, the descendent of a refugee of 1870-71 - when Alsace was annexed by Germany - who then set up farms and vineyards in Algeria:
Irma s'étonnait: ainsi Karl avec lequel elIe allait régulièrement au concert ou à
l'opéra, qu'elle avait pris pour un "Alsacien de souche", voici qu'il lui parlait,
avec quelle émotion et uniquement à travers ses interdits d'enfant, d'un pays,
l'Algérie, où, c'était sQr, elle ne mettrait jamais les pieds.
Alsace, Algérie: les deux mots tanguaient soudain [. , .] ces deux noms
de pays, de terroir noir, lourd d'invasions, de ruptures ou de retours amers.
(285)
Irma marvelled: so Karl with whom she went regularly to concerts or to the
opera, whom she'd taken to be a "dyed-in-the-woot Alsatian," this is how he
spoke, with such emotion and soiely by way of the interdictions of his
childhood, about a country, Algeria, on whose soil she would certainly never
set ioot.
Alsace, Algérie: these two words were suddenly reeling [. . .] these two
names of countries, of black soil, heavy with invasions, with ruptures or with
bitter homecomings.
Alsace and Algeria: two places of invasions, passages, ruptures, and bittemess. They meld
together, united by their respective histories of displacement: the Alsatians who fled to
Algeria to escape the German colonizers, only to become colonizers in tum. Now, together 166 with the returning pieds noirs, expeiied from an independent Algeria, corne Ngerians as well.
The stutter "Alsagérie" is repeated on Thelja and François's ninth night:
-Alsace, Algérie . . . Non, plutôt Alsagérie!
- Alsagérie, en quelle langue ce mot? Dans la tienne, dans la mienne?
- Redis ce mot dans ce noir de notre chambre, redis-le! [. . .]
- Al za gé rie!
- Ce mot, il tangue!
- Dis-le maintenant à ton tour. Je me souviens, il y a lontemps, ou un jour à
venir, peut-être, dans un lointain, dans un venir de L'avenir, je me souviendrai,
en tout cas - dans un lointain, dans un venir de l'avenir, je me souviendrai, en
tout cas -dans l'un de mes rêves dont il ne me reste souvent qu'un bruit, à
l'aube -toi, oui toi, tu apprenais ma langue! . . . Alors tu aurais dit, si nous
l'avions inventé - ni chez toi, ni chez moi, ou dans les deux parlers à la fois:
"el za djé rie"! [. . .]
-Je dis le mot comme toi; ou non, pas tout à fait: '4-5s-a-gé-rie! et je traîne
sur le s, je le double car j'y entends une douceur . . . Ta douceur!
- Et moi, une douleur. "Alza-gérie." Je le coupe ainsi en deux pour amver vite
sur toi. (372-375)
-Alsace, Algérie .. .No, rather, Aisagérie.
- Aisagérie, in which language is this word? Yours, mine?
- Say that word again in the darkness of our room, say it! [. . .] - Al za gé rie!
- This word reels!
- Now you Say it. 1 remember a long tirne ago, or perhaps on a day still to
come, in a far off coming becoming, 1 wiii remember, in any case - in one of
my dreams of which often nothing but a rude at dawn remains - you, yes you
were learning my language! . . . So you would have said, if we had invented it,
in neither mine nor yours, but in the two languages at once "el za djé rie"! [. . -1
- 1 Say the word like you do; or no1 exactly: Al-ss-a-gé-rie! and 1 drag out the
s, 1 double it because in it 1 hear a softness . . . Your softness!
-And 1 hear a pain. "Alza-gérie." 1 cut it in two Iike this to reach you quickly.
This melding of the names Alsace and Ai~ériepitches or reels, like the movement of a ship.
The movement is the result of a destabilization that occurs in stuttering language: a destabilization of words and their meanings, pronunciations, spellings and genders. It is a bteath -an unvoiced 's' versus a voiced '2' - that defines "Aisadrie" as a word of either sweetness or pain. The word, Alsanérie, itself is a rupture: an impossible place, a crack behveen two inhumanly heavy mernories in which the lovers meet momentarily, where their tongues intersect, but which will soon close up again, spitting the lovers out as it seals itself up. For François, this is a place of sweetness and softness, whereas for Thelja, it is bitter and painful. The fleeting happiness found in Alsaeérie forces Thelja's scar open: "Alsagérie donc, mon chéri, une cicatrice s'ouvre dans ce vocable?" 'Thus Alsagérie, my dear, does a scar open up in this vocable?' (374). It is this scar ihat ultimately compeiis Thelja to ieave her 168 friends and her lover without a word. At the end of the novel, Theija disappears without a trace from Paris (382). She returns to Strasbourg, city of refugees, where she wiil remain in hiding, a wounded exile (398-99). In discussing the produciion of her latest novei, Djebar writes that Les nuits de Strasbourg was an attempt on her part to "rethink" ("repenser") the city of Strasbourg; penser, she adds, but also panser: to dress a wound (Ces voix 234).
Strasbourg is Thelja's Athens: to which Sophocles' Oedipus, another wounded exile, journeys. Athens (tike Strasbourg) is a place where the paths of exiles meet, and in some cases, end: Oedipus's life ends in Theseus's kingdom. Importantly, Oedipus dies not in
Athens proper, but on the border of Attica, peripheral to the capital. Similarly, Thelja too remains peripheral to the city that welcomes her, unable to make herself at home there.
From Exile to Nomad?
Unlike the Vilna ghetto in Lveiosios trunka akirnirka (Stalemate), where aight Iines lead out of the ghetto, setting out the rhizomorphous structure of the novel, here, flight lines converge and exiles meet. Strasbourg in this novel is a junction or node that holds within it the possibility for transformation. A node is a place where two or more lines meet. In networks, it is a processing location: it can be a computer, or some oiher device, such as a printer. A node is where information converges, combines, and departs in a difierent form.
Strasbourg, then (as a node), is a processing location. Here the paths of exiles converge and are met with the possibility of fundamental change. The exiles in Djebar's Strasbourg are iaced with the challenge to become nomads: to change fundamentaliy their relationship to the
place from which they have corne, turning their escape into a journey. Eve and Thelja are the two main sites of this expriment to turn Gom exile to nomad. For both characters, this 169 transformation is attempted through erotic language, or through the language in which the erotic act is lived. The novel, as the title suggests, is structured around nine nights that Thelja and François spend together, and it is through these nights that the novei explores role of language in momenis of intirnacy: "quelle langue accompagne, suit, enveloppe les êtres, pendant l'amour: dialogues ou monologues, ou soliloques, mois échappés, aveux d'abandon pendant les instants d'intimité; la mémoire aussi cherche ses mots, plonge dans un lointain souvenir d'enfance, même cinquante ans après'' 'what language accompanies, foilows, envelops beings during Love: diaiogues or monologues, or soliloquies, escaped words, confessions of abandon during moments of intimacy; memory also seeks out words, dives into a far-away childhood cecollection, even Gfty years later' (Ces voix 237). Both Thelja and
Eve combat the guilt of sleeping with the enemy, and both find thernselves troubled by childhood oaths that their adult life decisions now contravene. As a child, Eve vowed never to set foot in Germany: "c'était après avoir pleuré à la lecture du Journal d'Anne Frank. -
'Jamais, jamais, moi née d'un père juif andalou et de mère juive berbère, jamais je ne mettrai les pieds en Allemagne. Même pas pour un jour! Me préserver! . , ." 'it was after having cried while reading Anne Frank's Diary. 'Never, ever will 1, born of a Jewish Andalusian father and a Jewish Berber mother, never wiUI step onto German soil. Not even for a single day!
God forbid! . . .' (68). She sidesteps this childhood oath - that is to say, she adheres to the letter of the oath, rather than its spirit - by living as close to Germany as possible, without actuaiiy stepping on German soil, so as to be near her lover. Thelja's oath, which she made as an adolescent after having met a great heroine of the Algerian War of Independence, was even more expiicit. Legend has it, Thelja tek her lover, that this heroine let herself be seduced by her interrogator (221). Although the seduction changed nothing in terms of the woman's fate (she confessed to carrying bombs for the rebels regardless of her love affair), it is this story that led Thelja to impose a ban on French lovers for herself (222). Unlike Eve,
Thelja cannot sidestep her oath and must break it with both eyes open. In Monolin~ualismof the Other, Jacques Derrida describes his own relationship to the French language as
"forbidding and forbidden" ("forbidden for me, to me, but also dy me") (33). Écriture,' he tells us is:
the loving and jealous vengeance of a new work of training [dressaee], which
attempts to restore the language and believes it is at the same the reinventing
it, fmally giving it a form (deforming, reforming, and transforming il), making
it pay the price of the interdict, or (what no doubt amounts to the same thing)
acquitting itself, in its proximity, of the price of the interdict. This gives rise to
strange ceremonies, secret and shameful celebrations. (33)
Eve and Thelja both atteinpt to deform, reform and transform their relationship to the
forbidding-forbidden language through erotic expression. Both engage in strange ceremonies,
but (as we will see) with differing results.
As the daughter of a maauisard who lost his life during the Algenan war, Thelja
carries a kind of survivor guilt with her. To sleep with a Frenchman is to betray her father, a
Jacques Derrida's notion of endlessly deferred meaning seems to be related to Deleuze's concept of stuttering language (which also deforms, reforms and transforms language) and to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of multiplicity. Although there is much to say about the overlap of écriture, stuttering and rnultipticity, this wiii have to wait for a future project. For more on écriture, see Derrida's De la aammatolom'e. 171 war hero who was kiiled three months before the birth of his daughter. This is a fact of which she is reminded every day through her name, which means "snow." Conceived during her rnother's brief wartime visit with her rebel husband, Thelja received her name to commemorate the icy wak down from the mountains that almost took her rnother's liie in the first few days of her pregnancy. Thelja, like Oedipus: cames her name like a scar, as a reminder of her origins and a kind of invisible umbilical cord that can never be cui. The war is never far from her mind, a heavy inheritance for which every Frenchman she meets is expected to answer. For Thelja, her lover, François - as his name suggests (his narne means
'Frenchman') - is every Frenchman. He is more than twenty years Thelja's senior, and she sees in hh- by virtue of his age and nationality - the very men who killed her father.
Testing her lover on their first night together in Strasbourg, she asks him where he was during the war:
- La guerre chez toi? . . . Je ne me trouvais ni en Alsace, ni en Algérie (il a
comme une absence, il ajoute très vite, avec un accent amer qui La surprend).
Ni même en France! [. . .] Non, se souvient-il à nouveau, je n'ai pas fait la
guerre d'Algérie. Une chance, sans doute, bien que ma "classe" fut celle de
1956 ou de 1957. . . (54-55)
"The war in your country? . . . 1 was neither in Alsace, nor in AIgeria," (he has
something like an absence, he adds very quicidy, with a bitter accent that
Oedipus7sname means "swoilen foot." His ankles were pierced when he was abandoned as a child, and he stU carried these scars as an adult. surprises her). "Not even in France! [. . .] No," he remembers once again, "1
wasn't in the Algerian War. Lucky, no doubt, even though mine was the
"class" of 1956 or 1957. . .
François, it seems, disappoints Thelja, because he does not take her bait and hardly notices the traps that she attempts to set for him. It becornes clear quite early in the novel that Thelja is, in fact, ashamed of her lover: she can hardIy bring herself to tell her childhood friend Evc about this new relationship (105-12), and finds the prospect of introducing the two even more disconcerting. During the first few days of her stay in Strasbourg, Thelja's project is to improve François, and she takes it upon hersell to tcach him to be a nomad. Thelja devises a game whereby they will spend each of their nine nights together in 2 different hotel
(although, on one occasion, they do spend two nights in the same establishment). She spends
the day surveying ("arpenter" [log]) the city, then they meet in the same restaurant every
day, where she announces her decision of where to spend the night:
Je lui ai propos5 ce jeu, dès le premier soir. . . le ne lui dis mon choix de la
nuit qu'au moment du dîner! . . . Pourquoi? Peut-être une façon de lui faire
sentir, chaque soir, qu'il doit devenir nomade! Sans attaches, comme moi,
mais dans sa propre ville, celie de son passé, celle où il travaille! Peut-être
qu'ainsi il ressentira, chaque matin, combien je suis prête, à tout instant, à
partir [. . .]. (109)
1 suggested this garne to him right from the very Eirst night. . . 1 don? teU hirn
my choice for the night until dinnertime! . . .Why? Perhaps it's a way of making him feel, every evening, that he must become a nomad! Without
attachments, like me, but in his own city, that of his past, that in which he
works! Perhaps this way he wiii sense every morning the extent to which 1 am
ready, at every moment, to leave [. . .].
Although Thelja purports to teach François how to be a nomad, her own success in being truly nornadic is dubious. Thelja is anything but "sans attaches," considering thc amazing trans-Mediterranean umbilical that stretches back ovcr three decades. The difference between a nomad and an exile is that a nomad is at once a manger and at home everywhere, and thus never looks back in nostalgia when he or she moves on, while an exile is defined by the los of a horneiand and by a longing to retum. Thelja's scar, her guilt, and her unresolved attachent to the Aigerian War prevent her frorn becoming a nomad. The guilt of possibly loving François is so overwhelming that she cannot even name him during their first two nights together. François remains nameless until page 114 of the novel: "Eve ma plus proche, nomme pourtant son amour! . . . Or moi (je vous parle, et je vous le dirai sans doute ce soir), je ne peux dire tout haut, ni même en moi, votre nom . . . Pourquoi? Si longtemps après la guerre -je précise 'la guerre chez moi entre les v6tres et les miens"' 'Eve, who is closest 10 me, nevenheless names her love! WhiIe myself (I'm speaking to you, and doubtless 1'11 tell you this tonight), can't Say your name aloud or even to myself . . . Why? So long after the war -more precisely, 'the war in my country between your people and mine' (78). Thelja's relationship to François is defined by distance and guardedness, as she addresses him in the formai %a"except in the most intirnate of moments: during sexual penetration or oral sex
(57). It is a distance that Thelja, imagining herself a nomad, cultivates in the name of 174 travelling lightiy. Alter their second night, she describes François as a deaf widower, still mourning the 105s of his wife. She claims that it is precisely the prospect of making love with a true stranger, whose attachments lie elsewhere, that attracts her. This way, after their ninth night, she will be able to slip out quietly without him even noticing:
Un homme veuf. Un veuf dont je ne sais même pas s'il est toujours
inconsolable . . . Cela, en fait, m'est égal: je le découvre soudain. S'il est hanté
par l'autre, celle qu'il a perdue il ya seulement un an ou un an et demi, peut-
être qu'au fond, c'est cela qui m'attire: je fais l'amour avec un étranger, et en
plus il est comme sourd. Il semble m'entendre, il me touche, il caresse mon
corps, mais tout ce que je dis, ce que je veux dire, ce que j'oserai avouer, peut-
être qu'il ne l'entend pas vraiment, ou quand cela lui parvient, c'est trop tard! .
. . Je ne serai plus ià! (106)
A widowed man. A widower who, for al1 1 know, is stiU inconsolable . . . 1
don't really care either way: 1 discover this suddenly. II he is haunted by the
other, by her whom he lost only a year or perhaps a year and a half ago, maybe
this is what ultimately attracts me: 1 make love with a stranger and what's
more, he's deaf. He seems to hear me, he touches me, he caresses my body,
but al1 that 1 Say, that I want to say, that 1 will dare to admit, perhaps he
doesn't reaiiy hear it, or when he does, it's too late! . .. t won't be there
anyrnore.
Later, this deaf lover becomes 'the talkative lover,' who talks and talks in order to avoid the 175 subject of her leavhg, which Thelja brings into the conversation by casually mentioning the ninth night:
L'amoureux bavard, ce fut lui, le bavard: car il ne parla ni de l'amour, ne des
couples liés pour quelques jours, ni même du leur -pour cela, il aurait fallu
demander, avec précaution, comme on s'approche d'un point douleureux (au
creux d'une hanche ou à une jointure, en brusque lancée . . .), que signifiaient
ses derniers mots à elle [. . .] "la neuvième nuit." (119)
The talkative lover, he was the talkative one: because he spoke neither of love,
nor of couples joined together for a few days, not even of theirs - for that he
would have had to ask with care, as one approaches a painful point (at the
hollow of a hip or a joint, abruptly knocked . . .), what these last words of hers
meant [. . .] "the ninth night,"
The subject of the ninth night is a sore point. Interestingly, the narrator uses the word jointure, a joint, to describe the subject of this unspeakable ninth night. It is a juncture or a node, like Strasbourg itself. The ninth night, like the city, holds within it the possibility for radical transformation and change of direction. We may think of a node here like a roundabout: cars converge from al1 different directions, they get mixed up in a moment of unity, and then take fiight again in different directions. Thelja suggests that erotic language, and perhaps even the erotic act may be seen as nodes as weii. She poses the question: "y a-t-il un noeud ou même un sexe de la langue pour chacun de nous? De la tienne que je te prendrais peu à peu, que je sucerais, son après son, que j'avalerais comme si c'était ton autre 176 sémence?" 'is there a hot or even a sex of language for each of us? From yours, that 1 would take from you bit by bit, that I would suck, sound after sound, that 1 would swaIlow as if it were your other semen' (225). One of the meanings of the word noeud ("knot") is "node."
The formulation "sexe de la langue" rnay be understood in multiple ways: sexe may be a gender, a sexual organ, or sexual act; laneue may be either a tongue or a language. A sexe de la laneue can therefore be understood as a linguistic sexual organ, as erotic language, gendered language, the tongue as sexual organ, or employed in a sexual act. When lovers meet, their "sexes de la lan~ue"intersect: one lover drinks of the other. Erotic language (h langue érotique) is oral sex: both in the Besh and in language.
Through their transgression of childhood oaths, Eve and Thelja have exited the
Garden of Paradise and tasted the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. For
Thelja this fruit has taken on the form of a weet, liquid language:
Surtout comme j'aime le jus de la langue de cet homme - le français donc? -
et sa saveur, sa limpide fluidité, sa ruche secrète, son hydromel (mon
hydromel arabe aussi que je ne peux encore lui livrer), ainsi ces nourritures
sonores, je les tirerai à moi, je les mâcherai, je les triturerai, je Ies déglutirai, je
deviendrai animal fernelie, mais ruminant pour les enfermer en moi après les
avoir bues de ses lèvres, pour les emporter liquéfiées dans mon corps, loin,
loin de cette ville. (227-8)
Above aii, how 1 love the juice of this man's tongue - French, therefore? -
and his taste, his Iimpid îluidity, his secret hive, his mead (my Arabic mead as weU, which 1 cannot yet deliver to him), in this way I'U puil these sonorous
foods to myself, 1'11 chew them, I'U triturate them, I'U swailow, 1'11 become a
femaIe animal, but ruminating, to shut them up inside myself after having
drunk from his lips, to carry them away, liquified in my body, far, far from
this city.
The forbidding-forbidden tongue of her lover tastes as sweet as honey mead, and is as clear as water. Her lover's juice nourishes Thelja not once, but twice as she regurgitates the sonorous liquid and drinks again, so as to incorporate its nutrients more completely. This same night Thelja gags herself: tying a scarf around her mouth, seeking out mute pleasure, tongueless pleasure, pleasure without language:
Ou alors nous aimer en muets, plutôt! Tout le contraire . . . Nous aimer ainsi,
deux corps sourds et comme je désire habiter ce corps d'homme tellement
étranger, parlant un idiome que je ne comprendrai jamais . . . Ainsi au coeur
du désert des mots, nous poumons nous entrecroiser, nous pénétrer, nous
déchirer même, surtout nous connaître! . . . (226).
Or, rather, to love each other mutely! The complete opposite . . .To love each
other üke this, two deaf bodies and as 1 desire to inhabit this male body which
is so foreign, speaking an idiom that 1 will never understand . . . In this way, at
the heart of the desert of words, we would be able to intersect with one
another, to penetrate each other, even to rip each other apart, above alI, to
know each other! . . . 178
The gag makes the lovers deaf as well as mute: an inability to speak signals for Thelja an inability to understand. She abandons words, which become an arid space in which lovers' paths cross and interconnect. Even without words, sex is a node: a meeting place where transformations take place. Language nevertheless retums to their lovemaking on the sixth night in the forrn of stuttenng and the breaking up of erotic language. Thelja's words crumble in a moment of ecstasy: "Eue, dans une volupté qui coute, n'a pIus de phrases, à peine des mots courts, essoufflés, ébréchés, qui vont pour se briser, s'émietter" 'She, in a tlowing sensual delight, has no more phrases, hardly any more short words, breathless, chipped, that go to shatter, to crumble' (269-70). Thelja speaks in what Deleuze calls "breath-words," which he defines through the exarnple of Artaud: "Artaud's deviant syntax, to the extent thai it sets out to strain the French language, reaches the destination of its own tension in these breaths or pure intensities that mark a limit of language" (Essavs L12). Thelja minorizes language here: she expresses pure sexual intensity through a language that breaks apart and ctumbles. In the sarne way, "Alsagérie" is a breath-word when pronounced by François: the unvoiced, breaihy s in his "Al-ss-a-gé-rie," as opposed to the painful voiced z of Thelja's
"ma-gérie," makes the word soar with intensity and pIeasure (375). Erotic language stutters; it breaks through the distance that Thelja has cultivated between herself and François, as she addresses him in Arabic:
Soudain un seul vocable tendre, de velours, en deux temps; le même, répété,
rnoduie. Un mot arabe qui va, qui vient. Le plaisir dans lequel eile ne veut pas
se noyer fait vibrer ce mot-appel, ce mot-oiseau qui frémit, qui s'ébroue,
exhale et retient pourtant le désir affolé de l'amante: "ta. . .inta" [. . .]. Le mot d'amour, plein à craquer, se coagule dans la bouche de Thelja.
L'emplit. S'élance, tournoie au-dessus de leurs visages, revient en vrille et
s'épuise, se ratatine. (270)
Suddeniy, a single tender, velvet, two-stroke vocable; the same one
modulates, repeatedly. An Arabic word that goes, that cornes. The plcasure in
which she does not want to drown makes this word-cal1 vibrate, this word-bird
that quivers, that shakes its wings, exhales and nevertheless retains the crazed
desire of the lover:
"ta . . .intan [. . .].
The word of love, full to bursting, coagulatcs in Thelja's mouth. Fills
it. Soars, swirls above their faces, returns in a tail-spin, drained and shrivelled.
Thelja becomes a femme liquide (270), a liquid woman, in danger of drowning in her own pleasure (272). It is the Arabic "you": tainta that causes language to stutter here, and the Lover to quiver. As we have seen, in L'amour. la fantasia the narrator uses 'foreign' (Arabic) words to create a bamer between herself and the French reader. Non-French words are used withoui explanation in that text and without the inclusion of a glossary - with the effect of alienating the French-speaking reader. Thelja's use of Arabic here, interestingly, has precisely the opposite effect. Her addressing of François in Arabic signals a moment of unprecedented intimacy and closeness between them.
French Kisses
Like Thelja, Eve is an exile, and in choosing Strasbourg as hec place of refuge, Eve 180 re-enacts the fiight of Jews to Strasbourg four centuries ago. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, on the eve of the Reformation, Alsace had become an important Jewish centre, as the
Jews of Western Europe had been expeiied fiom almost every other country there (Ben-
Sasson 590). While the Strasbourg of the sixteenth century was a relatively hospitablc place for Jews, by the eighteenth century the situation had changed quite dramatically and a
"tradition of hatred" (760) against the Jews had developed there instead. With the arriva1 of the Nazis, the centuries of Alsatian-Jews and Franco-Germano-Alsatians living together came to an abrupt end, as most of the Jews who left with the general evacuation in 1939 did not return. In Les nuits de Strasbourg the daily ringing of Strasbourg's cathedra1 bells at six o'clock in the evening is a bitter reminder -or as François calls it, a "mémoire alsacienne"
(an Alsatian memory) -of the disappearance of the Alsatians' none-too-welcorne neighbours:
"Depuis des siècles, ces mêmes cloches ont marqué le couvre-feu i des kilomètres à la ronde: et les juifs [sic.] de la ville devaient ne plus être là" 'For centuries these same bells have rnarked the curfew for kiIometres around: and the Jews of the çity were to be there no longer'
(80). The bells signify a double disappearance: that of the Jews at the end of the day, and thai of the Jews at the end of the war. Eve is part of the new Jewish community of Strasbourg
(now the fifth largest in France [Kleinschmagerl60-1]), whose members have corne tiom elsewhere and who do not have the inheritance of memories of fiight to and evacuation from the free city. Even so, the centuries-old conflicts between the local Germanic population and its Semitic neighbours flare up: Eve and Hans fight for the first rime when Eve has the impression that he is making fun of her, calling her a bonne mère iuive 'a good Jewish mothet' when she raises the subject of circumcising the baby if it is a boy. Ham attempts to 181 release the tension by using a neutral language, English: "-'Tu veux frapper sur l'autre joue, maintenant? . . . Je ne suis pas le Christ, 'my love'! 11 a terminé en anglais, au moins un terrain neutre, un minuscule espace, un tout petit terre-plein d'espoir, 'my love', deux mots passe-partout, voletant d'une autre rive . . ." ' -Do you want to hit me on the other cheek now? . . . I'm not Christ "my love!" He finished in Engfsh, at least a neutral terrain, a minuscule space, a tiny strip of n flat ground of hope, "rny love," rwo master-key words: fiuttering over from another shore . . .' (163). The strategy works, and Eve's anger quickly dissipates.
Thelja, in recalling a visit with Eve, while the latter lived in Marrakech, calls her a chiidhood friend a nomad (61). That visit, in turn, awoke in Thelja the feeling of king a nomad: "Chaque soir, un mois durant, j'ai goûté l'émerveillement de ma première liberté ('Je suis comme chez moi et pourtant vagabonde!' m'exclamais-je ravie)" 'Every evening, for an entire month, i tasted the wondec of my Grst freedom (Tmat home and nevertheless like a vagabond!" 1 exclaimed to myself, delighted)' (62). Eve then emigrated to Holland wiih her husband, Omar, writing to Thelja that she would never return to Algeria (63). Eve and
Omar's mamage has since broken up; Eve met her new lover, Ham, in Rotterdam and has moved to Strasbourg in order to be dose to him. They communicate in French, as Eve, although she is conversant in German, cannot bring herseif to speak to her Lover in his language (69). Despite the vanous self-imposed interdictions on the part of Eve (against her lover's homeland and language), she is liercely devoted to flans. UnIike Thelja, Eve's lover's name rails off hec tangue with pride and ease, she calls him "L'homme de ma vie" 'the man of my life' (69), and vows aever to travel again without him. Their love affair, she explains to 182
Thelja, started without language: "Comment, ces trois premiers jours, à Rotterdam, nous nous sommes aimés? Je ne me souviens pas, ou plutôt j'en suis sûre: sans les mots, en dehors des mots, lui et moi soudain muets . . .La stupéfaction, le trouble amoureux rend muet"
'How, during those first three days in Rotterdam, did we love each other? 1 don't remember, or rather, I'm sure of it: without words, outside of words, he and 1 suddenly mute . . . The stupefaction, the discomfort of being in love makes one mute' (69). Thelja and Eve experience the same phenornenon: the beginning stages of love rnake them mute. It is a state of being that cannot possibly be sustained, as the moments of erotic frenzy pas, and communication becomes necessary. While Thelja never manages to corne to a linguistic peace with her lover, Eve and Hans corne to an understanding. The impulse to resolve the linguistic stalemate, and to move beyond childhood oaths and genealogy anses, no doubt, because of the baby they are expecting. Hans and Eve rnake love while she is six months pregnant: "Pour la premitre fois, ils ont fait l'amour à trois, l'enfant endormi entre eux, les divisant et les multipliant. . ." 'For the first tirne, they made love as a threesome, the child, asleep behveen them, dividing them and multiplying them . . .' (159). The couple then, dividing and multiplying, has becorne a rhizome. The three of them are now interconnected, and it is therefore imperative to find a solution to the Iinguistic conflict: they find it in the history of Strasbourg.
Hans and Eve definitively put and end to their quiet war through a linguistic exchange. On February 14,842 AD.,two brothers (Charlemagne's grandsons) took the historie Oath of Strasbourg, each in the other's language. The brothers' oath of alliance to one another becomes Eve and Hans's oath to one anoiher. Eve explains: L'important. . . l'important aujourd'hui, l'important pour nous. . . C'est que,
vois-tu, leur serment d'alliance (et pour nous, c'est un serment d'amour
plutôt), l'important pour moi aujourd'hui est que Louis, l'aîné, va prononcer
le serment en français, ou plus exactement, dans la langue du frère, et que
Charles le Français va l'épeler, lui, dans la langue [. . .] de l'autre [. . .].
Je suis prête, ô Hans, prête aujourd'hui a te parler dans ta langue . . .
Tu vas dire le serment le premier, en français; après, je le lirai à ta suite en
allemand . . . ! (236-37).
The important thing . . . the important thing today, the important thing for us.
. . It's that, you see, their oath of alliance (and for us it's more of an oath of
love), the important thing for us today is that Louis, the elder, will pronounce
the oath in French, or more exactly, in the language of the brother, and that
Charles, the Frenchman will spell it out in the language [. . . 1 of the other [. .
el*
Oh Hans, today 1 am ready to speak to you in your language . . . You
will say the oath FiIst, in French; aiterward, when you are finished, 1 will read
it in German . . . !
It is, of course, appropriate that the original exchange happened on Valentine's Day, considering the manner of its appropriation by the lovers (St. Valentine was martyred in 273
AD.).
Both Thelja and Eve attempt to resoIve their linguistic strife through a luiguistic 184 exchange. In Thelja's case, this is a physical linguistic exchange: she drinks from her lover's tongue. Eve's finguistic exchange is a much chaster French kiss, and her exchange of tongues proves to be much more successful:
Ô mon amour, se dit silencieusement Eve dans la voiture, tandis qu'elle
conduisait, toute guerre, entre nous, est finie! Avant que l'enfant n'arrive,
nous avons éteint tout souvenir de généalogie! . . . Dieu soit loué, ou comme
dit ce serment, pour le salut de Dieu, pour celui du peuple, et pour le nôtre! . . .
(238)
Oh my love, Eve said silently to herself in the car as she drove, al1 war
between us is finished! Before the baby's arrival, WC have extingushed al1
memory of genealogy! . . . God be praised, or as the oath says, t'or the
salvation of God, for that of the people and for ours! . . .
Eve has made a successful transformation and become a nomad: she has left the past behind,
extinguished aii memory of genealogy. In Deleuze's terms, she has moved from a process of
archaelogy-art, "which penetrates the millennia in order to reach the immemorial," to one of
cartography-art, "built on 'things of iorgetting and places of passage"' (Deleuze, Essa~s66).
Thelja, for her part, never moves beyond archaeology. Uniike Eve, she cannot escape her
origins.
Antigone of the Suburbs
An important and somewhat puzzling trajectory in Les nuits de Strasbourg is the 185 smail, mainly Beur: theatre troupe's production of Antigone that occupies a sizeable portion of the second half of the narrative. The troupe is led by Jacqueline, but the production is interrupted (like the writing of the novel which tells its story) by her sudden death when she is murdered by her Algerian ex-lover, Ali. The story of Antigone reverberates throughout the novel, and Antigone figures appear everywhere in various mutations: Djamila, who was to play Antigone and whose love for Jacqueline rernains unspoken (just as some suggest that there is an unspoken incestuous love between Antigone and Polynices [Weil 25]),mourns her fnend pubiicly during the theatre troupe's tribute to its slain director; Aïcha, the murderer's sister, cornes to rnourn her brother's fate, ta explain her brother's actions, blaming herself for his crime: in a childhood transgression, Aïcha rnourned their father's death in Alsatian, the wrong language, and for this, she explains, her brother has never forgiven her. Even Eve and
Hans act out a distorted version of the Antigone story: in their linguistic oath whereby the two brothers, Louis and Charles make peace, they do so in order to unite against a third brother, Lothaire. Fratricide and sisterhood form the core of the Antigone rnyth.
In his article "The Structural Study of Myth," Claude Lévi-Strauss categorizes the events of the Oedipus myth in terms of overrating and underrating blood relations. In the category of overrating blood relations (a category which encompasses the events "Kadmos seeks his sister Europa ravished by Zeus" and "Oedipus marries his mother Jocasta" [190]), he includes the event: "Antigone buries her brother Polynices despite prohibition" (190). The
' Beurs: This is a tenn that refers to "Arabs" (North Africans) born in France. It is a verlan term, a kind of pig-Latin, whereby syllable of words are reversed (verlan itself is the word l'envers 'backward' with its syliables in reverse). The word "beur" is a distorted version of the syllables of the word "arabe" in reverse. 186 category of underrating blood origins includes the events "Oedipus kills his father at Laios," and "Eteocles kills his brother Polynices" (190). Events not included, but which easily could be incorporated into Levi-Strauss's chart of events, in the category of underrating blood realtions, are: "Creon prohibits burial of Polynices" and "Creon entombs Antigone." In
Sophocles' Antieone the struggle behveen Creon and his niece is a struggle over how to value blood relations: Antigone, in her insistence on burying her brother at any cost, overvalues blood relations, whereas Creon, both in his initial prohibition against burying his nephew Polynices' body, and even more so in his decision to leave his niece to die in the cave, undervalues blood relations. Importantly, their conflict is about bunal: whether to return the body to the earth (reterritorializing it), or leave it to perish separate from the earth
(deterritorializing it). Underrating blood relations, therefore, is to overrating blood relations as deterritorialization is to reterritorialization. Antigone stands for reterritorialization; while
Creon and the state stand for detemtorialization.
An uncanny paraiiel to Djebar's Anti~onecan be found in Grete Weil's 1980 novel
Meine Schwester Antigone (Mv Sister, Mv Antigone). Weil -a German Jew - like Meras and Djebar, writes in the language of the eneniy, though she crosses no linguistic boundary to do so (her iamily only ever spoke German). Meine Schwester Antieone speaks to the problem of escaping one's origins: "Kommt und bewundert mich nicht. Sagt mir die
Wahrheit. Eine, die nicht über den Schatten ihrer Herkunft springen kann, die sich selbst ablehnt und um sich schlagt. Eine Verstorte, die die Konsequenz nicht zieht" (38) 'Come ye and do not admire me: TeU me the truth. A woman who cannot jump over the shadow of her own origins, who rejects herself and nails about. A distraught woman, who does not draw the 187 proper conclusions' (36). Weil's narrator joins Antigone, Aïcha, and Thelja in a group of wornen who cannot escape their origins. Like Thelja's story in Les nuits de Strasbourg,
Meine Schwester Anti~oneis a novel about a wound, and an attempt to soothe the pain of an ever-reopening wound. The narrator of the novel (like the novelist herself) is a Holocausi sunivor and a wciter. Like the unwitting Beur theatre troupe, Weil's narrator races against death ta write her novel about Antigone, unsure if she will su~velong enough ta finish it:
Liefi mich von allem, was mir SpaB machte, verführen. Warum denke ich von
meiner Verführbarkeit im Imperfekt? Als ob es in der Gegenwart anders ware.
Als ob mich mein Alter davon abhielte, allem nachzulaufen, was mir
Abwechslung, Veranderung, Anteil am Lebendigen verspricht. Als ob ich
nicht noch imrner das tate, was mir gerade gefillt. Als ob ich nicht Zweifcl
hatte, da0 die Antigone, die mir doch wichtiger ist als alles andere, je fertig
wird. (55)
1 let myself be seduced by whatever gave me pleasure. But why am 1 thinking
of my susceptibility to seduction in the past tense? As if things were any
different now. As if my age prevented me from running after anything that
promises diversion, variety, involvement. As if 1 did not do exactly what
appeals to me at any given moment. As if 1 did not worry that my Antigone
book, which means more to me than anything else, may never be finished.
(51)
Weil's narrator is an exile at the end of the war. Like Thelja, she (though always on the 188 move) never becomes a nomad, as she lives her Life in a state of flight: "Flucht nach Hause.
Flucht als Zustand, ohne ni wissen, wovor ich fliehe. Fiucht vor den Nazis - das waren noch
Zeiten, reale Angst, reales Davonlaufen, sich verstecken, Notwendigkeit ni handeln, manchmal ungeheuer verkehrt [. . .] " (117) 'Fieeing home. Fleeing as a state of being, without my knowing what 1 am fleeing. Fleeing €rom the Nazis - now, those were the days; you had someihing real to be afraid of, you were really running away, hiding, compelled to act, even if what you did was sometimes preciseiy the wrong thing [. . .]' (107). She is constantly on the move: visiting friends, going for walk in parks, talking on the telephone in order to escape the pain of her multiple losses (her firsr husband to Mauthausen, her xcond to leukemia, and most recently her dog to unknown circumstances). Greta Weil's narrator is a deterritorialized wornan in that she has become a woman without a true home. At one point in the noveI she carries two passports one German (a country which expelled her) and a stateless one (which is later traded in for a Dutch passport). The narrator teils us, "Emigration ist nicht der Stun aus der eigenen Klasse in eine tiefere, Emigration ist FaIlen ins Bodenlose"
(161) 'Emigration is not merely falling out of one's riwn social ciass into a Iower one; emigration is plummeting into a bottornless chasm' (147): an exile belongs nowhere, whereas a nomad belongs everywhere. The narraior's wound prevents her hmboth iinding a home once again, and Gom stopping her îiight in order to journey and become a nomad:
Zwar gehen keine Transporte nach Polen mehr, aber ich habe keine Lust, die
letzten Kriegswochen im Gefhgnis ni verbringen, unter der Bedrohung, im
ietzten Augenblick erschossen ni werden. Auch storen mich die Hoiiander,
die durch die Deutschen hindurchschauen, als wareo sie Luit. Ich gehore weder ni den einen noch zu den anderen, gehore zu niemand, bin allein, ohne
Ahnung, was tun, wohin gehen, wenn der Kricg vorbei ist. (66)
It is true that no more Jews are being shipped to Poland, but 1 have no desire
to spend the last fcw weeks of the war under the threat of being shot at any
minute. I am also imtated by the Dutch, who Iook right through the Germans
as if they were made of air. 1 belong to neither group, be1ong to no one, am
alone, without the faintest notion of what to do or where to go once the war is
over. (60)
Although it is unlikely that Djebar had Weil's Meine Schwester Antigone in mind when writing Les nuits de Strasbourg, the two novels are uncannily connected in terms of their themes, their uses of the Antigone myth, and through the experiences of individual characters. Weil's novei even includes a transgressive love affair between the Jewish narrator and a German named Hans:
Ich weckte meinen blonden Freund Hans jeden Mogen durch das Telefon.
MuBte vorsichtig zu Werk gehen, um nicht dabei ertappt werden. Am
nachrnittag, bevor ich ihn traf, erfand ich Geschichten über Freundinnen,
Kinobesuche, Radtouren. Meine Eltern wuBten nicht einmal, ddes einen
Ham gab. Moglichenveise hatten sie nichts dagegen gehabt. Aber ich wollte
diesen Hans und manche andere Hanse fur mich allein haben. (130)
Every morning 1would caii my blond boyfiiend Hans on the telephone to wake him. I had to be very careful to avoid being caught. Before going to our
afternoon rendenous, 1 would invent al1 sorts of explanations about visiting
girl friends, seeing rnovies, taking bicycle trips. My parents did not even know
a Hans existed. Possibly they would have had no objection. But 1 wanted to
have this Hans, and other Hanses as well, entirely to myself. (119)
But Weil's novel offers not rnerely a point of cornparison to Djebar. Meine Schwester
Antipone is a node: it brings the trajectories of Djebar and Meras, hvo authors from very different places and frorn very different traditions, together. Nodes, where flight-lines converge, are also where passages strike out once again, once transformations have taken place. For me, Djebar's Antigone struck out ûn a passage which led to Weil's Antigone, which in turn leads us to Meras, via Simaite. This connection back to Simaité is made when
Weil's narrator becomes Antigone, hidden in a library:
Ohne Licht hinter der Bücherwand, in einem Hohlraum, gerade breit genug,
um liegen zu konnen, auf einer sich immer mehr zusarnmenklumpenden
Kapokmatratze am Boden, unter mir ein klammes Leintuch, eingewickelt in
eine Pferdedecke, zitternd vor Kalte bus zurn Schlaf, der kornmt und warmt.
Auf des Messers Schneide. O Brautgernach. Von den Gottern verlassen. Von
aiiem verlassen. Den Tod erwarten. (68-69)
In pitch darkness behind the wail of books, in a hollow cornpartment just wide
enough to let me lie dom on a kapok-fiiled mattress that got more and more
matted, under me a clammy sheet, over me a horse blanket. 1 trembled with cold until sleep came and warmed me. Living on the razor's edge. O brida1
chamber. Abandoned by the gods. Abandoned by everything. Waiting for
death. (62-63)
Antigone, hidden in the library, becomes archive, but also archivist as she too, like the iibrarian of Vilnius, smuggles the letters of those who will die?
Es gab eine Zeit, in der stand auf Schmuggeln der Tod. Wurde man erwischt,
ging man mit auf Transport. Transport bedeutete Verfrachtung nach
Auschwitz in Gas. Ich habe es trotzdem getan. Unfihlige Briefe aus der
Joodschen Schouwburg - Samrnelstelle der zur Deportation bestimrnten Juen
Arnsterdarns - im Büstenhalter, im eigens zu diesem Zweck aufgetrennten und
mit einem ReiBverschIuB versehenen Mantelfutter oder, wenn ich eilig war,
ganz einhch in der Handtasche. Briefe an irgendwekhe Leute, von denen sich
die Gefangenen, rneist vergeblich, Hilfe versprachen. (86-87)
There was a time when the penalty for srnuggling was death. If caught, you
went off to the next transport. That meant being shipped to the gas chambers
at Auschwitz. In spite of that 1 smuggled countless letters out of the Joodsche
Schouwburg - the coliecting point for those of Amsterdam's Jews slated for
deportation - putting the letters in my brassiere, in the lining of my coat,
which had a specid zipper for the purpose, or, when 1 was in a hurry, simply
--
a Weil smuggied ietters while she worked for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. in my handbag: letters to people the prisoners hoped, usuaiiy in vain, to
receive help from. (79-80)
The connection is then made for me diiectly back to Lveiosios trunka akimirka (Stalemate) through a chess game. Just as Izia, in Meras's novel, sits uncomfortably during his chess game, due to the wounds he has received from the beatings at the gate, Weil's narrator too sits uncomfortably, as a result of her wounds acquired through multiple losses.' In both cases, staying alive is the object of the game: Izia plays to keep himself and the rest of the ghetto children alive; Weil's narrator plays in order to avoid seeing what she is doing and, more importantly, to occupy herself in order to resist the ever-present temptation to commit suicide:
Nach dem Krieg schriebe ich schlieBlich ein paar Bücher. Sie handeln von
Krieg und Deportation. Ich kann von nichts anderern erzahlen. Der
Angelpunkt meines Lebens.
Jetzt die Antigone. Der Tag wird kommen, an dem auch dieses Buch
fertig ist. An dern ich es zu Grabe [rage wie ein geliebtes Wesen. Nichts
bleibt. Mitten in der Nacht schrecke ich auf: ich mochte tot sein.
Ych bin Mitte dreiBig, sehne mich nach einem Mann, finde den verheirateten Joschi, Jude, Ungar, Psychotherapeut, melanchotisch, gottergeben, gescheit und in guten Augenblicken hintergründig witzig [ . . .].Unser Programm verlauft stets gleich: zusammen schlaffen, danach Schachspielen, um nicht dauernd über das Furchtbare reden ni müssen" (104).
'1 am in my mid-thirties, longing for a man, and find Joschi, a married man, a Hungarian Jew, a psychotherapist, melancholy, submissive to God's will, intelligent, and in his better moments capable of subtie humour [. ..1. Our program never varies: intercourse, then playing chess, to avoid having to discuss the terrible situation ail the tirne' (94). Todessehnsucht, leise stets vorhanden, wird laut. (82)
After the war 1 finaiiy manage to write a couple of books. They deal with war
and deportation. 1 have nothing else to write about. The key to rny life.
And now Antigone. The day will come when this book too will be
finished. The day when I commend it to its grave like a beloved being.
Noihing will remain. In the middle OP the night 1 wake with a slart: I want to
be dead. Longing for death, always lurking in the background, becomes
clamorous. (75)
A new assemblage is thus Eormed here: the trajectories of four unlikely multipticities (for each of the texts that forms the assemblage here is connected to a rhizome of its own) -
Meras, Djebar, Simaite, and Weil - corne together. This assemblage connects texts ihat reach out beyond themselves, sending passages in surprising directions that lead the wiiiing reader on a journey that, unforseen, loops back on itself. We have seen that an assemblage is a cairn: a pile of stones that either marks a grave or a path. The image of the cairn, therefore, embodies the central tension that is at work in minor literatures and in the works of aiI the authors that make up this Final (though final only in terms of this study) assemblage: that is, the tension between deterritorialkation and reterritorialization; between cartography-art and archeology-art; and between the book as infinite journey or the book as grave or final destination. For aii of these authors and their respective nacrators - Meras's Izia, Simaité's own voice, Djebar's Thelja, and Weil's narrator - war is the key to their lives. What ultimately connects the texts of these authors is their simultaneous stniggle to honour the 194 memory of a community's sufiering, and to move beyond the past in order to cease the
continual reopening of wounds and re-enactment of painiul histories. These contradictory
impulses are never finaiiy resolved, as Djebar's revisiting of the question of writing in the
language of the enemy - even after Le blanc de l'Algérie - with Les nuits de Strasbourg
clearty illustrates. And it is a tension that Deleuze and Guattari fully acknowledge, despite
their cry for writers to become nomads in their own language in order to deterritorialize
literature. Minor iiterature demands movement: one can only produce flight lines if one is
moving away. Deterritorialization, thereiore, demands reterritorialization for its very
existence. We require form first, before we can deform, reform and transform. "So fremd, so
nah," (205) 'So alien, so close' (185), says Weil's Antigone of her relationship to Polynices.
This is the relationship of minor literature to 'its' language: local but foreign; understandable,
but untranslatable; same, but diiierent. It is this contradiction: so alien, so close, that rnakes
minor literature stutter. Condusion
Vllgiers - Alnius - Vilgiers
No more than Don Quixote does Kafka remain in the world of books. [. . .] His
literature is not a voyage through the past but one through our future. Two
problems enthrall Kafka: when can one sav that a statement is new? - for better or
for worse - and when can one sav that a new assemblage is comine into view? -
diabolical or innocent, or both at the same time. (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 83)
The books of minor literature do not contain it. Minor literature spills out beyond itxlf, beyond its texts into archives, letters, cemeteries, and libraries, creating connections to more and more multiplicities. The readers of minor literature! Iike the 'authors' in Paul Zumthor's study of
French medieval poetry who change poems as they recite them, become its writers: as texts pass through these readers'lwriters' hands pages go missing, words get smudged, and in time, much-
Loved books are bound and rebound so that the words disappear into the book's gutter. In this passing of texts from hand to hand 'errors' inevitably enter the text, taking us on a 'bonne voyage,' and asking us to imagine what it could mean to 'epater les bourgeous.' It is in its
'errors' and in its intersections of tongues that minor literature creates new statements: we can say that a statement is new when it stutters, infwed with new meaning. A new assemblage cornes into view when errors, contradictions and curious coincidences begin to bounce from text to text: when illicit Hanses tum up here and there, and when the quantity and exact nature of a vegetable changes from story to story. Assemblages are built by the readers and writers of minor literature
195 196 together, therefore minor literature is as much a kind of reading as it is a kind of writing.
1 have argued that aiinor literature is defmed first and foremost by an ever-present tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and 1 have tried to show that this process happens not only in language (as in Djebar), but in narratives (as in Meras) as well. 1 have argucd that minor Iiterature is collective and continually becorning (for better or for worse); that minor literature is always politicized. In places Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature and A Thousand Plateaus read like manifestos: they cal1 us to action and to change.
Become a nomad in your own language! Practice cartography-art, not archeology-art! But minor literature &gg hold within il a possibility for revolution, and this revolutionary possibility is threefold: in language, in our relationships to the past, and in our paths to the future. Deleuze and
Guattari allow for thought experiments that can make things happen: the multiplicity frees us
from the dynamics of colonizer/colonized; stuttering allows us to hear several things at once; and the rhizome allows us to escape the ghettos of our past. In advocating cartography-art over
archeology-art, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject the past; in doing this they trace a path from
the past to the future. Minor Literature lets go whilc hanging on.
Toronio-Vilnius-Toronto
2000-2001 Appendices
Chapter Two:
The Death of Liuba Levitska
1. From Yitzhak Arad's Ghetto in Rames:
A symphony orchestra was organized in the ghetto, and its first concert for the public was given on January 18, 1942, under the sponsorship of Gens and the ghetto police. Deputy
Chief Glaman opened the event with a memorial tribute to the Jewish victims. The artistic program for this first performance included 'S'g'lust zich mir vaynen' ("1 am moved to weep") by Chaim Nachman Bialik and from Goldene Keyt by Y.L. Peretz, a piano concerto by Chopin. "Eli, Eli, lama azaviani" ("O Lord, O Lord, why hast thou abandoned me") rendered by Cantor Idebon, and the song Zamd in Shtern ("Sand in the Stars") sung by vocalist L. Levitska. The proceeds of the evening, which totaled 4,000 rubles, went for social welfare.
There were times when control over procurement of food was tightened, and people caught purchasing or bringing it furtively into the ghetto were arrested and executed.
Seventy-three Jews, including twenty-three women and two children, were shot at Ponar in
March 1942. There is no information as to their supposed offense, but it is clear that sorne of them were put to death for atternpting to smuggie food into the ghetto. The rnurder of Jews for buying and smuggling food continued throughout the existence of the ghetto. Dessler succeeded, at the beginning of June 1942, in releasing from Lukiszki a total of thirty-seven
Jews who had been detained because of food purchases and failure to Wear the yeliow patch
197 198 on their clothing. Six Jewish women were killed while trying to obtain food in October 1942; another ten women were murdered on November 18,1942, for a similar attempt. Lyuba
Levitska, a well-known singer in the ghetto, and another woman were detained by Germans at the ghetto gate in January 1943, on the charge of being in possession of 2 pounds of grits
(groats) and a little butter. Both were shot and killed at Ponar. Gens pubfished a notice in the ghetto on May 4, 1943, in which he stated that the Security Police had executcd two persons
caught in the act of buying food, and he warned that, in accordance with the Security Police
announcement, every Jew caught outside the ghetto purchasing food without permission would be executed. (321)
2. From Hennan Kruk's The End of Jerusalem of Lithuania (Chronicles 1939-44):
[. . .) Yesterday, 47 persons, including 7 Jews, were shot at Ponar. Who were the Jcws who
were shot?
Those who lived on Aryan passports: a mother and 2 children from Kovno and a
woman fiom Grodno. The brigadier of Nachshub Camp, Vitin, was exectuted for stealing, in
fact - for trading in brandy. The last of [hem were the employees of the ghetto Iabor office,
Monye Stupel, and the popular Jewish singer Lyuba Levitska, both of them - because they
were aiieged to have stolen beans [. ..].
We have already written the story of their arrest. From then until the last iew days,
people said that Levitska sang and became the songbird in the prison. The guards used to
stand at the door and ask her to sing. From the Christian celis they applauded and admired
her. Now, it is clear that, aside €rom the others, Stupel and Levitska were executed in
Ponar. For stealing 1 kilo of beans apiece.
The news struck the ghetto like a thundedap. Few wanted to accept it, few wanted to beiieve it.
A shudder passed through the ghetto!
We wiil write in more detail about the two victims. Today we will only mention: Levitska is one of the best Jewish singers. Monya Stupel was one of the beautiful pleiade of Vilna
Bundists, one of the small group of Bundists in the ghetto, a brother-in-law of the Bundist
Vigilius Cahan.
[between January 2P and January 30&, 19431 (854-55)
3. From Yitschok Rudashevski's Diarv of the Vilna Ghetto:
Thursday the 14"' [January 19431
Today the ghetto is excited again, and especially the workers of the "Schneiderstube."
Murer has again caused trouble for a change. New victims have fallen into his clutches. The singer Lyube Levitski was retuming with someone €rom the taiior shop and was carrying peas into the ghetto. Just then Murer arrived unexpectedly. He ordered them to stop. They
ran. Holding a revolver he caught them and asked them where they were coming €rom.
Levitski answered that she was coming from the kitchen of the tailor shop where she was
working on pas. Murer commanded the Jewish poiice to give each of them 25 lashes with
wet towels. And bleeding they were led away to Lukishki from which one seldom returns . . .
. Murer, a raging devil, mshed to the tailor shop. The workers say that he raged there like a 200 storm. First he ran to the pot to see what was being cooked (to convince hirnself that Levitski had told him the truth). The cooks in great terror uncovered the lids of the kettles. The room became full of stearn, so that they could not see one another. Crazy Murer shouts, "Light!"
Matches are brought to him. The matches do not bum in the stearn. Mad with anger he asks the Jewish cook what is being cooked. The Jew anwers: "On my sacred honour, only barley with potatoes." Murer beat up the Jew, threw himself with an axe upon two Jews who werc sawing wood, claiming that they do not look like woodcutters . . . .This is how he raged, insulted and tormented people . . . . The ghetto is terribly upset. Levas said that had he been here the two persons would not have gone to jail. He would have lashed their faces with a whip, sated Murer with their blood, but they would have remained in the ghetto. Murer would not have forced them out. With blood one can easily quench his thirst to torture and to
torment. Levas is probably nght but how terrible, how sad our life is, how helpless, how
exposed we are to dangers and tortures . [. . .]
Friday the 29' [January 19433
Today the ghetto is saddened by the news. Lyube Levitski and Stupel who were
recently arrested were shot in jail. Until now people still believed that they could be freed.
We were told that Lyube Levitski used to sing for the jail guards in order to get a slice of
bread. She sang arnong the cells until her life was cut off. And thus a talent came to an
untimely end . . . . (123-4)
4. From Macha Rolnikas's Je devais le raconter: 201
On a fusillé la chanteuse Liouba Levitskaïa. C'est Mourer [sic.] qui en a donné l'ordre. Elie est morte pour un kilo et demi de pois qu'elle avait voulu rapporter dans le ghetto.
Alors qu'il passait en voiture, Mourer avait remarqué Liouba Levitskaïa et Stoupel marchant dans la rue Etmon. Mourer les a arrêtées et a exigé de voir ce qu'elles portaient. 11 a découvert des pois sur Levitskaïa et sur Stoupel des pommes de terre. 11 a donné L'ordre de les emmener à la prison de Loukiski.
L'arrestation de Levitskaïa fut douloureusement ressentie par tous. 11 n'y avait pas une personne au ghetto qui ne la connût.
On dit qu'en prison, elle chantait. Même les gardiens, maussades et coléreux, ne purent le lui interdire. Elle espérait toujours qu'on la sauverait. Mais les jours passaient, ses
forces s'épuisaient. Elle n'eut pas longtemps à souffrir en prison. Pas même quinze jours.
Dès qu'ils rassemblèrent un petit groupe de ces <
Les prisonniers firent le voyage dans un camion découvert. Liouba chanta pendant
tout le trajet. Dans les rues les gardiens la battirent pour faire cesser son chant. Mais il
n'existait par de force capable d'étouffer sa voix qui venait de retrouver toute sa fraîcheur.
Elle chantait! Un chant était à peine fini qu'elle commençait un autre. Ainsi pendant tout le
trajet. Même devant la fosse béante, eiie entonna son chant préféré: Deux blanches colombes.
Mais elle n'eut pas le temps de le terminer. (91-2)
They killed the singer Liouba Levitskaïa. It was Mourer [Mürer] who gave the order
to do it. She died for a kilo and a haii of peas that she had wanted to bring into the ghetto. 202
While he was passing by in a car, Mourer had noticed that Liouba Levitskaïa and
Stoupel were waiking in Etmon Street. Mourer stopped them and demanded to see what they were carrying. He discoverd peas on Levitskaïa and potatoes on Stoupel. He gave the order to take them to Loukiski prison.
The arrest of Levitskaïa was painfully felt by everyone. There wasn't a single person in the ghetto who didn't know her.
They Say that she sang in prison. Even the sullen and angry guards couldn't forbid her that. She kept hoping that she would be saved. But the days passed, and her strength dissipated. She didn't have long to suffer in prison. Not even fifteen days. As soon as they gathered a small group of these "cnminals," they took them to Paneriai.
The prisoners made the journey in an open truck. Liouba sang the whole way. The guards beat her in the streets to make her stop her singing. But there was no force capable of stiîiing her voice that had just rediscovered its freshness. She was singing! She had hardly finished one Song when she began another. And so on throughout the whole journey. Even in front of the gaping pit, she sang her favourite song: Two White Doves. But she didn't have the time to Finish it.
5. From Shoshana Kalish's introduction to the song "Tsvev Tavbelekh" 'Two Doves' in Yes,
We Sang:
In January 1943, about a year after the first concert in memory of those rnassacred in
Ponar, Liuba was rehearsing with the ghetto orchestra, under the direction of Wolf
Durmashicin, for an opera performance in which she was to sing the leading role. She 203 practised her part every day, softly singing it to herself as she marched to and from her work.
On the day of the performance, though exhausted from ten hours of scrubbing military barracks, she returned to the ghetto filled with anticipation of the evening's performance. She was also apprehensive, for she concealed beneath her clothes a smaU bag of food that a non-
Jewish fnend had smuggled to her, which she looked forward to bringing to her ailing mother. At the gate, Franz Murer, the SS commander of the ghetto, had Liuba's group searched. When the contraband was found on her, she was punished with twenty-five Iashes on her naked body and was imprisoned in the ghetto's prison tower.
There was no opera performance that night. For a month, Liuba was kept in the solitary confinement. There, too, she sang, to cornfort prisoners in adjacent cells, most of whom had been condemned to death. "Liuba is singing in the tower," said the people of the ghetto. The nightingale of the ghetto had become the songbird of the prison tower. Even the
SS guards would corne to her ceii door to hear her beautiful singing. (8)
Ona SirnaiWs Letters
The foilowing are letters written by Simaite to the poet Kazys Jakubènas (1908-1950) in
Kaunas. These letters were ail written in Vilnius during the Nazi occupation of the city.
During the tirne span that these letters cover, simaite was entenng the ghetto on a regular basis.
In the 1930s the poet Jakubènas was opposed to the Smetona regime and was sent to prison many times for his political activity. In the 1940s he came into confiict with the Soviet system when he refused to become a KGB informant regarding the activities of his hiends and colleagues. Duhg the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, Jakubènas disseminated anonyrnous texts that became songs as they made their way through the Lithuanian population. In 1946 he was expelied irom the Writers' Union for the writing of anti-Soviet vcrses that dealt with Soviet deportations of Lithuanian citizens (322 Kubilius, Samulionis,
Zalatorius, and Vanagas). He was then sentenced to five years impriscinment in a Sibcrian camp. Kazys Jakubenas was killed by KGB agents in the Rasos cemetery in Vilnius on
January 8, 1950.
6. Letter to Kazys Jakubënas.
21m El9411
Mielas, brangus Kazy! labai senai gavau nuo Tavp lai3kq ir prancûziSb knygq. Ui viskq aeiü. Senai nerakiau Tau. Bet niekados neparnirgdavau. Zinau, kad esi gyvas. O paraSyti
IaiSkus tikrai nebüdavo kada, nors keldavausi 4 v. ryt4 ir eidavau gulti 8-9 V.V. Likdavo
sehadieniai. Bet ir jie ne visi priklausydavo man, Dabar, kai igtyno [iStino] kairioji koja ir
esu priversta guleti lovoje, paraSysiu visiems draugams IaiSkus ir paskaitysiu keletq labai
norimy knym. &aip nuo karo pradiiûs iki Si01 teperskaitiau iS viso Feuchwargeno' '"tydas
Süssas," "Fiavijus luzas" ir Werfelio2 "Musa-Dag."
Dabar, kada sveikos kojos man labiau reikalingos, negu kada nors, ar ne pykta [pikta],
This name is difficult to decipher. It could be "Teucherwargen" as weU.
Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890. He enjoyed a very successful literary career und the rise of Nazism. A Jew, Werfel was expelied from the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933. In 1934 his novel Die vierzie- Taee- des Musa Daeh (The Fortv Davs of Musa Da*) was banned in Germany. Werfel died in Beverly HUS, California in 1945. kad a!: priversta guleti lovoje.
IS Vito suiinojau, kad tarnauji kaipo bühalteris. Bet juk Tau tas darbas, turbüt, visai
[add Russian: ne po dushe]. IS brolio suiinojau, kad gyveni drauge su Metiurn. Na, perduok
Jam patius geriausius linkejimus, kaip ir kitiems prieteliams. ParaSyk nors keletq iodiiy,
kaip gyveni Tu ir kiti. Nekantraudama lauksiu iS Taves IaiSkelio.
Per tq laikq neimoniSkai daug matyta ir iggyventa. Ir ZveriJkas pradas virJija
irnonigh imonese. 1IIX ui 1,500 rl. iSémiau senukq iS kalejimo. Ir ta dienq belaukiant jo,
buvo vedami kalèjimam tiikstaneiai iydy. O to niekad nepamirSiu kol gyva büsiu. Siandien
gavau iiniq, kad senuko vel nebera. Turbüt jo daugiau niekad nebematysiu. Zkta vienas po
kito mano geriausieji prieteliai. Geda gyventi, geda turéti pastogq, gèda turéti galimumg
nusiprausti ir t.t., kada tükstaneiai imoniq ne tik tokiq minimaliniq dalyb nebeturi, bet kada
Damokio Kardas kabo ant jq galvy kas valandq, kada kiekvienas gali tyeiotis ir kankinti, kas
netingi. kiaS pirmiau jus [juos?] tik mylejau, tai aS dabar dievinu ir tas begalines kaneias,
nes iS tiknljq jas tik iSrinktieji gali taip kentejo [kenteti]. Ir kaip ivairiai ivairüs imonès tai
pergyvena.
!%aipjokio dvasinio gyvenimo neturiu. Speju vos susitvarkyti ir apsiharinti.
Gyvenimas dabar yra be galo sunkus visais ativilgiais. Kalbq visai nesimokau. Su kalbomis
gyvenime nuolatos taip atsitinka, kad susidaro tokios qlygos, kad net prie geriausiq noq ir
valios nera galimumo mokytis. Skaudu del pranciiq kalbos. Sekmadieniais Iankau
sirnfoninius koncertus. Bet pasidiiaugti iS visos düSios a3 jau nieku [sic.] nebegaliu.
Kiekvienas dnaugsmas yra uinuodytas, ir eiaugtis taip noréhisi (sic.].
Ir Vilniuje yra ivestas ghetto. Ir 7/IX per vienq dien4 buvo visi suvaryti ir tegalejo 206 pasiimti tik tiek su savim, kiek pane&. O 8/IX, nors tai buvo sekmadienis, dienos metu buvo skubiai kalamos dvoros [tvoros], kad atskirti suveStus nuo arijv. O vakar jau II ghetto panaikintas ir kur dingo imones nebeiinau.
Ziemos labai bijau, nes bus ir alkana ir Salta. Ir dabar tik 2 kart i savait$ imoniSkai pavalgau, tai kai gaunu 200 gr. sviesto ir 350 gr. mesos. O Siaip vien duona ir bulves. Bet jau treCig dienq, kaip ir bulviq niekur nebera. ZvèriSkumas ir apsnüdimas. Kultürinio gyvenimo beveik jokio.
2l/X [1941]
My dear, sweet Kazys! 1 got your letter and the French books a very long time ago. Thank you for everything. It's been a long time since I've written to you. But 1 never forgot you. 1 know that you are alive. And, in truth, there was never any time to write letters, even though 1 was getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 8 or 9 p.m.. Only Sundays were left. But even al1 of thern didn't belong to me. Now that my left leg has swollen up and I'm forced to lie in bed, 1 will write letters to al1 my iriends and read a few much-anticipated books. Othenvise, since the beginning of the war I've only read Feuchenvargen's3 "Süss the Jew," "Flavius
Joseph, and Werfel's' "Musa Dagh."
Now, when 1 need healthy legs more than ever before, isn't it maddening that I'm
forced to Lie in bed.
See note 1 above. " See note 2 above. 207
1 learned fom Vitas that you're working as a bookkeeper. But this job must not be to your lil~ing.~1 learned from your brother that you're living together with MeCys. Pass on my very best wishes to hirn, as well as to our other friends. Write me at least a few words about how you and the others are. 1 wiii wait impatiently for a letter irom you.
During this period [since my last letter], I've seen and experienced an enormous amount. People's brutal origins overpower their human one. On September 1" 1 paid 1,500 rubles to pet an elderly man out of jail. And even on hat day, while 1 was waiting for him, thousands more Jews were king led to prison. I'll never forget it until the day 1 die. Today 1 got news that the old man has disappeared once more. 1'11 probably never see him again. One after another, my closest confidants are dying. I'm asharned to be alive, ashamçd to have a roof over my head, ashamed to have the possibility of bathing, and so on, when thousands of people don't evzn have these basic things anymore, but when Darnocles' Sword is hanging over their heads at every hour, when whoever feels like it can mock them and torture them. if before now 1 simply Ioved you [them?], then 1 now worship you [them?] and that endless suffering, because, in truth, only the chosen people can suffer that way. And how differently different people experience this.
Otherwise, 1 have no intellectual spiritual life. 1 barely manage to clean up after
myself and bathe. Al1 aspects of life are incredibly difficutt now. I'm not studying any
languages at ail. It often happens with languages in [my] life that the circumstances become
such that, even with the best will and intentions, there is no possibility of studying. It's
This phrase is wcitten in Russian in the original letter. 208 painful with regard to French. On Sundays 1 go to the symphony. But 1 can't feel joy for anything with my entire sou1 like before. Every joy is poisoned, and 1 would so much likc to feel joy.
A ghetto has been set up in Vilnius too. And on September 7"' everyone was herded there in a single day. They were only aliowed to take with [hem what they could carry. And on September 8", even though it was a Sunday, fences were humedly nailed together during the day, so as to separate those who had been brought in from the Aryans. And yesterday the second ghetto was liquidated, and 1 don't know where those people went .
I'm very much afraid of the winter. because it will be a hungry and cold one. Even now 1 only eat like a normal person twice a week, when 1 get 200s. of butter and 350g. of meat. Otherwise it's just bread and potatoes. But this is already the third day that potatoes are nowhere to bc found. Brutality and lethargy. Almost no cultural life left.
7. Letter to Kazys Jakubènas.
7/III Cl9421
Mielas Kazy! iQsiuntei per Vitq vish gavau. Labai dekui. Be galo nudiiugau sulaukusi laiSko ir naujy eiléraEiy. Jie taip gerai iSreiSkia müsy dieny nuotaikas. Rafyk ir daugiau, mielasis Kazy. Labai lauksiu nors keliy atspausdinty eileraiXiy vaikams, O veliau rinkinio.
Vitas, jteikdamas pinigus sako, kad Tu liepes sunaudoti tik sau asmenifkai. Nelabai aS tokiy dalyicq klausau, kai man geroji BroniCka tai liepia. Tai3au Tavo noras iS karto bus iSpildytas visu 100%. Nusipirkau muilo ir nociu dantis gydyti. Be Tavo paramos paskutinis dalykas büty buvp man visai nejmanomas. 209
Siais metais aS gyvenu daug geriau negu praeitais. NeSalu, nes Jonas aprüpino mane küru. Baisu ir prisiminti, kaip praeitais metais iki naujq meb Salau. Ir su maistu nera taip blogai, kaip praeitais metais, kai pasitaikydavo tokiv dieny, kai nebüdavo nei duonos, nei bulves, tekdavo pasitenkinti vien kava su druska. Dabar to nera. Duonos pagal korteles man uitenka, bulviv nusiperku laisvojo rinko [sic.j kaina. Nuo Ji4 naujq meîq net turiu nuolatos riebalil. Kai vienq riebalq baigiu, kaip iS dangaus iSkrinta [igkrental kiti. Ir [ai be jokio praSymo iJ mano pusés. Yra imoniy, kurie dar ir Siais laikais gaivoja apie kitus.
Bet ko labiausiai trüksta - tai Iaiko ir visai nebeturiu jegil ir sveikatos, O padaryti dar taip daug norisi ir reikia. Norisi nors kiek 2moniSkiau gyventi. Tureti ne vien pareigas, O ir laisvo laiko sau. hau,kad gyvensiu tik vienq kart4 pasaulyje, todel taip ir norisi sau pagyventi. Kad bent galeeiau ikimiegoti kaip reikiant ir skaityti, skaityti. Ai kaip norisi! Bet
kai tenka susidurti su pragariSkomis kib imoniv kantiomis, tada dingsta noras ir patiai gyventi. Diiaugtis, kaip pirmiau iS visos düSios, rodos, jau niekad nebemokésiu. Sunku man
betiketi, kad "O praeis laikai pagl~,O praeis ruduo". . . Rodos, kad bus vis dar ir dar blogiau.
Vienu atiivilgiu aS esu laimingesne uj: Tave. Mano ?Ciai6 ne visad baigèsi
nepasisekimu. Büna ir pasisekimg, taeiau kiekvienas jy, net maiiausias perkamas perdaug
dideliu ikikvojimu jegil ir laiko. Kaip tanisi4 nakti nuskaidrina ivaigidés, tai müq laiJkais
kiekvienas susidurimas su imonemis, turiniintus [turineius] Sirdi ir proh, nuskaidrina ir
paiengvina gyvenimg. O geq Zmoniq tikrai esarna pasaulyje. Ir be galo drqsiy ir kitiems
This word is very diificuit to make out. One possibility is that it is a Russian root coupled with a Lithuanian ending: "mec-i5ai." The Russian "plestits" means to trudge, so the stutter "ples-eiai" may be translated as 'trudgings,' which is how 1 have tentativeIy translated it. 210 atsidavusii). hoathilgiu gyvenimas mane labai lepina. Sutikau tiek daug gerq ir jdomiy imonh. Esu labai dekinga Likimui, kad Tave turiu, Kazeli, savo geriausiq draugq tarpe. AS taip noréciau, kad Tavo gyvenimas büQ Iengvesnis, kad nekentetv Tavo artimieji imonès.
Jei ir biituni KriWionys [KriWionisl, tai nenoréciau, kad Tu man rojv linkètum, kada toks baisus pragaras verda iemyje [?ie:emeje]. Kai bus rojus ierneje, tai bus rojus sieloje ir visur. Ar gali büti kas lairningas, kada kiti taip kentia?
Pastaruoju metu gyvenimas atima viskq, kas man yra taip brangu. Labai senai kas tai nudiiovè "Vargo dainas." Surasti jas visos pastangos nuéjo niekais. Man jos taip trüksta. Ga1 turi atliekarnq egzempliorii)? 0, kad turetum ir man padovanotum! Turbüt, ne.
Na, bük sveikas. Stipriai butiuoju. Geriausiy linkejimy prietelarns, ypatingai Metiui.
Kaip Jis gyvena? Antanas ir kiti? Bük toks geras nors retkarCiais poq iodeliy paraSyti.
Ona
7/III [1942]
Dear Kazys! 1 received everything that you sent through Vitas. Thank you very much. It
made me extremely happy to receive your Ietter and the new poems. They express the
sentimenis of our times so well. Write more of them, dear Kazys. 1 wiii await at least a few
published poems for children, and later -a collection.
Delivering the money, Vitas tells me that you've said to use it only for myself. 1 don?
really listen to those kinds of things, when kind Bronitka says them to me. But your wish
will be fulfilled 100% immediately. 1 bought some soap and 1 want to have my teeth fixed.
Without your support, this last thing would have been completely impossible for me. 21 1
I'm living much bener this year than Iast. I'rn not cold, because Jonas provided me with coal. It's terrible even to remernber how 1 froze last year right up until the New Year.
And the food situation isn't as bad as Iast year, when there would be days when there was neither bread nor potatoes, and I had to make do with salted coffee. It isn't like that now. The bread that 1 get with my ration cards is enough for me, and 1 buy potatoes at free market prices. This year 1 even have a steady supply of lard. Whenever 1 finish one piece of lard, more appears as if falling from the sky. And this happens without any requests on my part.
Even these days there are still people who think about others.
But what I'rn most lacking is tirne, and 1 don' t have any strength or health left in me, while there's so much that 1 want and need to do. I'd like to be able to live a little more nonnaily. To have not only responsibilities, but some free time for myself as well. 1 know that 1'11 only live once in this world, which is why 1 so much want to live for myself a Little. If only 1 could get a good night's sieep, and then read, and read. 1 want that so much! But when
I'rn confronted with the hellish sufferings of other people, the desire to live for myself disappears. It seems that I'il never again know how ta feel joy with my entire sou1 the way 1 used to. It's hard for me to keep believing that "Oh the mad times shall pass, oh the autumn will pas" . . . It seems that it will continue to get worse and worse.
I'm luckier than you in one respect. My [trudgings]' don't always end in failure.
Sometimes there are successes, however each of them, even the smallest, is bought for too high a price in tems of energy and time. Just as the stars üght up the proverbial night, each
- . .. -- - ' See note 6 above. 212 encounter through letters that we have with people who have a heart and a brain makes life brighter and easier. And there reaily are good people in the world. And endlessly brave and self-sacrificing ones. In this respect, life is reaily spoiling me. 1 have met so many good and interesting people. I'm very grateful to fate that 1 have you, dear Kazys, among my dosest friends. 1 really wish that your iife were easier, and that the people closest to you would not suffer.
Even if you were a Christian, 1 wouldn't want you to wish me entrance into heaven, when such a horrible hell is boiling on earth. Once there is heaven on earth, then there will bc heaven in the sou1 and everywhere. Can anyone be happy when others suffer like this?
Lately life has been taking away everything that is so dear to me. A long timr ago someone stole my "Songs of Suffering." N1 my efforts to tind them have been Cruitless. 1 miss them so much. Maybe you have a left-over copy? O how 1 wish that you had one and gave if to me! Most likely you don't.
Weil, take care. 1 kiss you. Best wishes to the friends, especially to MeCys. How is he? And Antanas and the others? Be so good as to write me a few words from time ta tirne.
Ona.
8. Letter to Kazys Jakuknas.
1UrV [1942]
Mielas Kazy! retai Tu mane lepini laiSkais, bet kai sulaukiu - tai tikra henté.
Kas del gr@inimo pinigil, tai aS galèi5au kas menesi be didelio vargo po 10 R1 gqhti. Tas manp visai neapsunkinhj. Dar ka* Tau labai dideli aEiü ui pagalbq suteikq 213 man. 0, kaip man tada buvo neimonigkai reikaii ngi pinigai! Deja, Tu klysti raSydamas, kad nors kartq galejai man padeti. Tai jau nebe pirmas kartas. hoativilgiu pas Tave trumpa atmintis.
"Archyvas" mane maiai domina, nes ir a3 rnanau, kad ten nieko doco. TaCiau
BaltmSaiCio poemeles labai laukiu, koki ji bebü~.Pasiilgau naujos 1ictuviSkos knygos ir dar eileraEiqI Pas mus Vilniuje iki Si01 jos nera. Ga1 todel, kad labai brangus persiuntirnas.
Geriau sivk man apdraustu, kad neiüw. Kas de1 "Lietuvos vaist. augalq sqraSol', tai visai nesiklapatyk, nes gali iS karto nepavykti surasti Grybausko. Man rodos, kad Pranui lengviau
[page rnissingl jau skaudüs isgyvenimai. Ga1 veliau, kada tai bus ne iSgyvenirnai, bet tik Siurpüs prisiminimai. Ir kasdien vis kas nors naujo, ir vis labiau iiauresnio.
Man malonu Znoti, kad Tu nekenti bado ir dar rükymo turi, nors ir esu grieitas rükymo pciehs. Pas mane büna dieny, kad gerai pavalgau, bet daugiau bùna dieni), kai tenka pasitenkinti vien duona ir vandeniu. Bet man tai niekas ir del to aS galvos nesuku.
Sunkiausias dalykas man 3altis ir neSvarumas. Muilo ir ui pinigus iki Si01 negaliu gauti. Nors ui maikas uimokejau, turiu orded, bet malh negaunu, nes irnonés sako, kad dar miSke auga.
Kokiai savaitei dar turiu malkq. Su visais atskaityrnais ir mano alga 85 Ri. To uitekti), jei nebiitq bütino ceikalo kreiptis i laimai ri&. O Cia jau neZnau kokios sumos reikalingos, kad patenkinti bütiniausius reikalus, kaip muilq, maikas. Kas deSimizj dienq nusiperku ir mésos laimajarne rinke.
Pas mus skubiai ruoSiami Zydg autoriil qrahi, kuriv knygos bus iSimtos. Taip pat iTiimamos visos, be jokios ihnties sovieQ knygos ir lietuviq paiangqiv raSytoj4 Deja, niekad 214 imonès taip neskaite iydy raiytojy, kaip dabar. Gaila, kad pirmiau to nedare ir nesusipaiino su ta turtinga literaiüra. Tarn, kas nors kiek pasta 4 Literatùrq, dabar tenka nuolatos ir nuolatos davinèti informacijas. Susipaiine stebisi turtinga ir graiia tos tautos literatura.
Prie3 kelias dienas iydams uidrausta gimdyti. Dabar gime vaikai turi büti nuiudyti, o moterys tapusios neiXiomis turi padaryti operacijas.
Buvau viename uidarame koncerte. Jei susitiksim kada, Tau papasakosiu. Pasiilgau
Tavqs labai. TaCiau apie susitikimq dabar nera kq nei galvoti. Jei iSvaiiuotum i kaimq, pranesk man adreq. Bük sveikas. Spaudiiu deSine.
Ona.
12/W f 19421
Dear Kazyst it's rare that you spoii me with letters, but when 1 get one - it's a rcal celebration.
On the subject of paying you back, 1 could give you 10 rubles a month without much hardship. This wouldn't burden me at au. Thank you so much again €or the help you've given me. How enormously 1 was in need of that money then! Alas, you're wrong when you wnte that for once you could help me. This wasn't the Grst the. In this respect you have a very short memory,
"The Archive" doesn't reaiiy interest me, because 1 think there's nothing worthwhile in it. But 1 await BaltruSaitis's little poem, whatever it may look like. 1 miss new Lithuanian books, and especiaiiy poetry! None have appeared here in Vilnius yet. Maybe shipping is too expensive. You'd better send it to me by registered mail, so it doesn't disappear. With regard 215 to "The List of Lithuanian Medichal Plants," don't even bother yourself, because you may not find the Grybauskas at aU. 1 think it's easier for Pranas
[page missing] painful experiences already. Perhaps later, when these will no longer be experiences, but only chilling memories. And every day there's something new, and even more brutal.
It's good to know that you're no1 suffering from hunger, and that you still have some tobacco, even though I'm a strict encmy of smoking. There are days hcre when 1 eat well, but there are more days when 1 have to make do with only bread and water. But this doesn't matter to me, and 1 don't boiher my head about it. The hardest thing for me is the cold and the filth. 1 haven't yet been able to get soap even for money. Even though 1 paid for firewood,
1 have an order, 1 never receive any, because people Say that [the trees are] still growing in the iorest. 1 still have enough firewood for about one more week. With al1 the deductions my salary is 85 rubles. Thar would be enough if there weren't such a need to deal with the black market. And I don't even know what kinds of sums would be necessary io satisfy the most basic needs like soap and firewood. Every ten days 1 buy some meat on the black market.
At work, lis& of Jewish authors whose books will be taken out [of the libraries] are humedly being prepared. Also to be taken out, without exception, are Soviet books and those by progressive Lithuanian authors. Sadly, never before have people read Jewish writers as they do now. It's a shame that they didn't do this earlier, and that they didn't get to know this rich literature. Those who know anything at ail about that literature are now constantly expected to hand over hiormation about it. As people get to know this people's literature, they marvel at its cichness and beauty. 216
A few days ago Jews were forbidden to give birth. Now the children who are born have to killed, and woruen who become pregnant must have operations.
1 went to a closed concert. If we meet sometime, 1'11 tell you about it. 1 miss you terribly. But there's no point even thinking about our meeting. If you go to the country, let me know your address there. Take care. 1 squeeze your right hand.
Ona.
9. Letter to Kazys Jakubenas.
26ff *' [1942]
Mielas, brangus, Kazy!
Esu labai, labai Tavp pasiilgusi. TaCiau, rodos, pasimatyti nera jokios vilties. RetkarCiais sapne matau. Kaiin, ar dar Kaune, ar iskeliavai i provincijq? Ar gavai mano IaiSkq paraSyq pries Kazio iSvaiiavinq? O Kazys yra par30 koja, kad neatveie man rankraSCio. A3 JO praSiau ir Tu Jam priminei, Jis apie tai man saké. Gai duosi Pranui, kad atveih.
Po Kano gr@imovis rengiausi Tau paraSyti, bec taip ir neprisirengiau: arba laiko
trüksta, arba esu labai pavargusi.
ParaSyk man nocs porq iodeliq. AS diiaugiuos, kad Tu taip padarei, kaip Kazys
papasakoja.
Dabar iS tiwq darbas imogui nieko neduoda: nei valgio, nei drabuiiy, nei avalines
[avalynès]. Dubu aS 8 !4 val., ci teuidirbu iS vis0 2 Mgr. laSini& Bet ir jq reikalinga ieSkoti
-- This astecisk is in the original letter. 217 kaip kokios pasleptos reienybes ar turto. Kadangi L/t algos atiduodu belieka vienas klgr. laSiniil. Bet tas '/z algos aiidavimas dar Siek tiek iprasmina darbq. O darbas dabar nuobodus, nejdomus. Ir neimoniSkai Salta tarnyboje ir namuose. TaCiau namuose kartq isavait$ pafienu. Darbq pradedam jau 7 v. ryto. Griitu 4 v. iS darbo taip iSvargusi, kad nebepajegiu net laiSkq bepardyti: atsigulu ir skaitau. Ir tada pamirStu ir nuovargi, ir alki ir viskq. Per i9tisus 9 menesius galima pasakyti aS beveik nieko neskaiCiau. Dabar skaitau daug, nes ty imoniy reikalais vaiMioju tik tada, kada dirbu iS ryto. Po darbo jau a3 nepajégiu jokiais vaikStinejimais uisiimineti. Labai noréMau vel pradet mokytis prancùzigkai, nes beveik visiSkai pamirSau, bet kadangi gyvenimas labai sunkus ir iiaurus, nevisada galima rasti jitgy susikaupti ir mokytis metimos kalbos. Kits dalykas, kada skaitai geq knygq, tada viskq pamirbti.
Ir pavasaris Sirnet toks Saltas. Tatiau mediiai ir sodai iaIioja ir tai teikia tiek daug graiaus ir tylaus diiaugsmo. Taip pat ir gelés iydi, nor ir paveluotai. TaCiau pavasariniy géliy nedaug turiu, nos jos Siniet labai brangios. Kaip gerai, kad pasaulyje yra geq knygy ir geliy.
,%aip su imonemis nesutinku beveik, tik tada, kai yra koks reikalas, nes arba skaitau, arba vaiwtioju, arba tarnyboje dirbu. Sekmadieniais dar lankau koncertus.
Kaip tu dabar gyveni, manai daryti? ParaSyk man.
DriiCiai spau&iu ra&. Linkiu tiek gero, kiek dabar yra jrnanoma. Deja, tas kas labiausiai riipi - neparagysiu.
Na, bük meikas ir ifitvermingas.
Ona. 26/V*9[1942]
Dear, sweet Kazys!
1 miss you very, very much. But it seems that there's no hope of us seeing each other.
Occasionaiiy 1 see you in a dream. i wonder if you are stiil in Kaunas, or if you have gone oui to the province? Did you get the letter i wrote you before Kazys's departure? Well, Kazys is a pig's leg for not having brought me the manuscript. 1 asked hirn and you rerninded hirn, he told me that you did. Maybe you can give it to Pranas to bring it.
After Kazys's return 1 kept meaning to write to you, but 1 never got down to it: either
1 don? have enough time, or I'm very tired.
Wnte me a few words at least. I'm happy that you did what Kazys has been telling me about.
Work really doesn't provide anyone with anything right now: neither food nor clothes nor shoes. 1 work 8 Yz hours, and only earn two kilograms of bacon in total. But you have to search for it like some kind of hidden treasure or rarity. Because 1 give away haif of my salary, I'm oniy left with one kilogram of bacon. But this giving away of half of my salary gives a little bit of meaning to my work. And work now is boring and uninteresting.
And it's inhumaniy cold both at the office and at home. But, 1 do heat my home once a week.
We start work at 7 amalready. 1 return Gorn work at 4 o'clock, so tired that 1 don't even have the strength to write letters anymore: 1 lie down and read. And that's when 1 forget my fatigue, and hunger and everything. Over 9 whole months 1 can say that I've hardly read
See note 9 above. 219 anything. Now 1 read a lot, because 1 only go walking with those people's errands when 1 work in the moming. After work I don't have the strength to take on any walks. 1 wouId very much like to start studying French again because I've lorgotten almost everything, but since life is very difficult and cruel, it's not always possible to find the strength to concentrate and learn a foreign language. It's a dilferent thing when you read a good book, then you lorget ever yt hing.
And it's such a cold spring this year. Even so, the trees and urchards are green, whiçh gives me so rnuch beautiful and quiet joy. The flowers are blooming as well, even if they're late, But I don? have very many spring Bowers, as they're very expensive this year. How wonderful that there are good books and flowers in the world. Otherwise, I almost never meet up with anyone, only when 1 have business with them, because I'm either reading or out walking or I'm at work. 1 still go to concerts on Sundays.
How is life treating you now, what are you thinking of doing? Write me.
1 squeeze yuur hand firmly. 1 wish you as much good as is possible right now.
Unfortunately, 1 won't write about what is most on my rnind.
Weil, take care and be strong.
Ona.
10. Letter io Kazys Jakuknas.
$/Xi[1942]
Mielas, brangus Kazyl prieS2 savaites gavau Tavo laiSkq ir labai nudwugau. Dekui Tau,
Kazy, kad nepamirfti manp. Tiesa, Micas niünis, kad niïiros rudens dienos. Tatiau iS kur 220 büti giedresniam laihi, kai gyvenimas yra toks neimonigkai sunkus ir iiaurus. hiesos, knygil ir honiq, labai jdomiy ir geq, a3 esu laimingesne ui Tave. Bet visai neturiu laiko, kad tomis gerybemis pasinaudoti, ypatingai susitikti ir draugiSkai pakalbeti su imonemis, jei nera jokio reikalo. To taip norisi. Retai kada tenka Siaip sau iS dSios pasikalbeti. Be laiko dar labai trüksta pinigy, maisto, ypatingai küro. Maisto ir pinigil trükumus a3 gana lengvai pakilu
[sic.]. Pats blogiausias - küro stoka. Tiesiog Siurpas ima, net kai pagalvoji, kad 6 ménesius - lapkritis-balandis - teks isgyventi nekürentam karnbaryje. Mano kambarys labai $altas ir rüsiu dabar jau kvepia. Ir dabar Salta miegoti su viena vatine kaldra. Uisikloju dar 2ieminiu paltu, mdeniniu iaketu, galvq apriSu vilnone skarele ir taip apsiklojus [Silstu, büna gerai ir net graiius sapnus sapnuoju, kad valgau kurnpi ir tort$. Neiinau, kodel dainiausia tie daiktai sapnuojasi, nes ir gerais laikais aS jy neperdainiausiai valgiau. Vienq kartg, lyg pasakoje, man prisisapnavo kambarys pilnas deiutiy, kurios buvo padarytos iS biskvity. Vos norejau pradeti valgyti ir atsibudau. Iki ryto a3 labai jfilstu ir atsibudus 3 ar 3 L/z v. ryio iki 7 v. ar 6 v. lopaus (tai lyg maldq kas ryt privalau daryti), skaitau ir raflau. Gen) knygy turiu labai daug ir iS bibliotekos, ir iS Felnos, ir gaunu gana gen) naujq IatviSky. Kai paliginu [palyginu] su latviSkomis knygomis, tai geda darosi ui m$i£kius. Ten ikina ir daug, ir gana geq latvifllq,
O ne tokie SlamStai, kaip pas mus. Man gera knyga nepaprastai daug duoda tokiais ypatingai sunkiais laikais. Galvoji, kartais ginEijisi su perskaitytu autorium, svajoji ir tada pamirflti apie gyvenimo sunkumus. Spaud2ia Sirdi kitq imoniv vargai, kaneios ir paieminimai. O tatiau padeti nera kaip, nors ir gyvybês nesigdetum. A3 Salu (ir tarnyboje visai nekurena), taCiau kai nueinu ien, kur yra maii vaikai ir nekürentas kambarys, darosi ne tik paeiai Mta, bet ir visai nekaip ant dSios. VilniSkis 1ietuviSkas 1aikraStis duoda patarimus, kaip apsisaugoti nuo 221
Siltinès. TaCiau, kada nera rnalh, muilo, tai tie patarimai nelabai pades. AS labai kenciu nuo to, kad negaliu imoniSkai ihiprausti, ihimaudyti ir ikiskalbti, nes pirÇi~nera ir malkos pasakiSkai brangios. Pirmiau gaudavom arbatos tarnyboje, dabar nebegaunam. Taip kad kas ryt tenka pasitenkinti viena Salta kava ir duona, tik pietums iSsiverdu [karitos?] kavos ir bulviy. Valgyt valgau kasdien, nes bulviy turiu. Bet kad isvirti bulves ir kavq reikalinga sukiirenti maiky ui 12 rb. Maistas labai vienodas iS dienos i dienq duona (nors jos kartais ir pritrüksta) ir bulves. Tik kas dvi savaites bùna "balius", kai gaunu sviesto ir cukraus. Apie mèq jau pradedu pamirSti, kaip ji atrodo. Eiies didiiausios nuo 4 v. ryto prie mesiniq ir gauna tik labai nedideli kieQ pirmqjy laiminglljy (apie 50-60 imoniy kasdien kiekvienoj mesineje). Kruopq jau senai visai nebegaunam. Paskutini ménesi jau ir milty nebegavom.
Dirbu nuo 9 v. ryto iki 7 v. vakaro su pertrauka pietums. Toks darbo sutvarkymas man labai nepatinka. Dar maiiau galima kq nors sau padaryti, negu dirbant iS eiles 8 L/z v. ir labiau vargina. G@us iS darbo, tuoj einu gulti, nes esu labai suhlusi ir pavargusi. O anksti ryQ vèl jaueiuosi gerai. Dideli diiaugsma man teikdavo simfoniniai koncertai, tatiau dé1 maUq stokos ir gyvenimo balaganizmo dvi savaites jy visai nebuvo. 0,kad nors Siandien ivykn)! Teatre bhu labai retai, nes ir laiko truksta ir bilietai neZmoniSkai brangus. Kits dalykas Rygoje. Ten darbo imogui kainy atfiIgiu teatras yra prieinamas. Buvau Ibseno
"Noros" premjeroje. Patiko. Kazys dirbo repeticijoje su artistais ir susiiavejo teatro darbu. To
(sic.) aS esu Iabai patenkinta. &aip Kazys visai nenq nebesuvaldo. Gaila i Ji net pasifiuréti.
TaCiau kur rasti kiîq toQ imogil, kaip ûq, kuris bütq Jam taip atsidavgs ir riipintiisi Juo. O
Jam imogus reikalingas, Jis pats nemoka tvarkytis. Kazys nunes ant Onos kapo nepaprastai graiy vaiw. A3 ir buvau tq die* su viena bendradarbe kapinese. Niekur taip menigkai 222 padamvainiky nesu rnaiiusi, kaip Vilniuje Bimet. Verta büty iStiq monografq paralyti.
2/Xi mes nedirbome. Taigi aplankius Onos kapq, nuëjau iiydy kapines. Ten iSvaiWEiojau apie 4 v. Paminklai sudauiyti, antkapiai ihartyti arba sudauSyti i Sipulius, ant kai kuriq antkapiy prisiktos didiiausios krùvos, mat ikinamoji Zydq kapinese taip pat sudauiyta, karnbariai, kur buvo atliekamos kulto apeigos, taip pat sudauiyti, €otografijos ibkustos arba subiaurotos. zinoma, Si darbq atliko ne viens, du ar net 10 Zmoniq, nes jie to ir noredami nepajègtu padaryti, O . . .
Perskaitiau Mazalaites "Karaliaus ugnis". Kokia miesCioniSka knyga ir niekam ji nereikalinga. Kodel Kruminas Jai nieko nepatarê. Géda ui tokiq knygq. Geriausiu linkèjimy broliui ir [the rest is written up the margin O€ the Ietter, and is illegible].
8flX [1942]
Dear, sweet Kazys! two weeb ago 1 got your letter, which made me very happy. Thank you,
Kazys, for not forgetting me. True, your letter was gloomy, as the autumn days are gloomy.
But how is a letter supposed to be sunny when life is so inhumanly diificult and cruel. The lights of very interesting and good books and people - I'm luckier than yoo. But 1 don't have any tirne at ail to benefit €rom this bounty, especiaily not to meet and have friendly conversations with people, when there's no business at hand. 1 so long for that. It's very rare that 1 have a casual heart-felt conversation. Aside from the, I'm very short of money, food, and especiaiiy coal. 1 can bear the shortages of food and money quite easily. The worst is not having enough coal. I shudder just at the thought that I'ii have to live for 6 months -
November-Apd - in an unheated room. My room is very cold and smeils of basement now 223 already. Even now it's too cold to sleep with only the Cotton blanket. In addition to that 1 cover myself with my winter coat, my fa11 jacket, 1 wrap my head in a wool scarf, and covered like this 1 warm up, it's good, and 1 even dream beautiful dreams in which I'm eating ham and cake. 1 don't know why 1 dream most often of these things, since even in better days
1 didn't eat them very often. One time, like in a story, 1 dreamt that my room filled up with little boxes that were made of biscuits. As soon as 1 started to want to eat them, 1 woke up.
By morning I've wanned up and once I've woken up at 3 or 3:30 am. 1 rnend my clothes (as if it's a prayer that I'm compelled to complete every morning), read and write until 7 or 6. 1 have a great many books both from the library and €rom Felna, and 1 get some pretty good
Latvian ones. Wtien 1 compare the Latvian books, 1 become embarrassed for ours. There rhey publish many and quite good Latvian ones, not the garbagc that we get here, A good book gives me an incredibie amount [of solace] in these especially difficult times. You think, sometimes you argue with the author you've just read, you dream and then forgct about Iife's hardships. Other people's troubles, suffering, and humiliations weigh heavily on my heart.
But there's no way to help, even if you were wiliing to give your life. 1 suffer from the cold
(there's no heat at al1 at the office either), however, when 1 go where there are little children and the room is unheated, 1 not only feel the cold, but my sou1 begins to suffer as well. One
Lithuanian Vilnius newspaper is giving tips on how to protect oneself against typlius. But when there is no lirewood or soap, those tips won't reaUy help. I'm really suffering irom the fact that 1 can't wash, bathe or do my laundry properly, because there are no bath houses, and firewood is incredibly expensive. We used to get tea at work, but not anymore. So every morning 1 have to make do with cold coffee and bread, I only have the opportunity to boil 224 myself some [chicory?] coffee and potatoes for lunch. As for eating, 1 eat every day as 1 have potatoes. But to boil potatoes and coffee one has to use up 12 rubles worth of Eirewood. The food doesn't Vary day to day, bread (though sometimes I'm short of it) and potatoes. A
"party" happens only every two weeks when 1 get sorne butter and sugar. I'rn starting to forget what meat looks like. There are huge lines in front of the butchers starting at 4 o'clock in the rnorning, and only the first ones in Line are lucky enough to get a small amount (about
50-60 people at each butcher shop). We haven't gotten any barley for a long tirne now. In the last month we didn't receive any flour either.
1 work from 9 o'clock in the morning to 7 o'clock in the cvening with a lunch break. 1 don't like this work schedule at all. There's even less that you can do for yourself than if you worked 8 95 hours in a row, and it's more tiring. When 1 come home frorn work, i go straight to bed, because I'm so cold and tired. But early in the morning 1 feel good again. The symphony concerts used to give me the biggest pleasure, but because of the firewood shortage and the absurdity of life, there haven't been any for two weeks. If only there were one today! 1 go to the theatre very rarely, because 1 don't have a lot of time, and the tickets are extremely expensive. In Riga it's a different situation. There, in terms of prices, a working person has access to the theatre. 1 went to the premier of Ibsen's "Nora." 1 liked it.
Kazys was working with the artists dunng their rehearsals and was impressed with the theatre's work. I'm very happy about that. Otherwise, Kazys is no longer in control of his nerves at aU. It's sad just to look at him. But where wiil he find another person like Ona, who would give herself to him and take care of him like that. And he needs someone, he doesn't know how to take care of himself. Kazys took an extraordinanly beautiful wreath to Ona's 225 grave. 1 was at the cernetery that day as weU with a colleague from work. I've never seen such artistic wreaths anywhere as those in Vilnius this year. It would be worth writing an entire monograph about them. We didn't work the day of MX.So, after visiting Ona's grave,
1 went to the Jewish cemetery. I walked around there for about 4 hours. The monuments are smashed, the headstones are knocked over or smashed to bits, there are huge piles of shit on some of the headstones, which probably means that the toilet in the cemetery is smashed as well, the rooms in which religious ceremonies are held are also smashed, photographs are scraped out [of headstones] or defaced. Of course, one, two, or even 10 people didn't do al1 this, because they wouldn't be capable of it even if they wanted to, but. . .
1 read Mazalaite's book "The King's Fire." Mat a bourgeois book that's of no use to anybody. Why didn't fiminas advise her? I'm embarrassed for such a book. Best wishes to your brother and [the rest is written up the margin of the letter, and is illegible].
11. Letter to Kazys Jakubenas.
7AII il9431
Mielas, brangus Kazy! po to kaip gavau tavo laiSkg su naujy mety pameikinirnais, ner iodelio. Tiesa, ir a£ Tau tik sausio men. rdiau. Bet kad neZmoniSkai trüksta laiko.
NepamirStu Tavqs. Pastaruoju laiku kila [kyla] nerimas: ar sveikas, gyvas esi. ParaSyk nors porq iodeliy. Kaip gyveni, kas gero?
Norejau Tau per Kazimieq paraSyti. Manau, kad gerai palaistei savo patrong, nes valdna degtinés nesigaili. Negerantiems yra dideiis nuostoiis, nes baisiai krito kaina degtinei.
NeparaSiau tada, nes laMiau liehvi iSkiSusi po viq miestq kad gauti sau nupirkti bateliy pagai orderp. Veltui, nors ir vuiojusu visai prakiurusiais batais, kuriq nebegalima bepataisyti. Sakoma, reikia turéti protekcijg, kitaip nieko gero nebus.
Simet tiesiog buvo pasityCiojimas iS Kaziuko tradicinio turgaus. Zinorna, nei baronb, nei Sirdiiq nieko ir su [spaktyva?] negalejo matyti. Net iS mediiagos ir mediio nebuvo
SÙd2h.j. Gaila. Buvo tik graiios sausos gelés, ir gelés iS mediio. Labai graiios ir meniSkos.
Deja, ir jq taip nedaug. Nustebino vaikiski smuikeliai. Matyti padarayti dideiio kaimo meisterio, nes grieiiant tokie graiùs garsai aidejo.
Gerai, kad SilCiau, dienos ilgesnes. Greit sulauksim pavasario, saules, geliu. 0, kad pavasaris atneSQ ta* iSvargusiems imonéms!
~iaipnuo 15 sausio rnano gyvenime ivyko viena gera permaina: turiu malb. Jonas padovanojo 2 metnis, paskui S1. dar vieng metrg. Paskui gavau dar meiw valdifka kaina.
TaÇiau supiaustymas ir suskaldymas ivare i labai dideles skolas. Tas slegia mane lyg kokia didiiausia kupra. Be to, dar porg bütiniausiq dalyb gavau nusipirkti valdiska kaina. Deja valdiska kaina nustatyta ne pagal valdifkus uidarbius. Ir muilas, oi kaip tas piauna imogy.
Bet negalirna kurti naujos Europos be muilo.
Siaip iki 15A smarkiai €alau, net susirgusi buvau. Tenka ir badauti, taCiau paskutines
2 savaites nebadauju. Pats blogiausias daiykas, kad labai truksta laiko, jegos silpnèja.
Dainiausia taip pavargstu, kad net paskaityti lovoje nebegaliu. Dar gerai kad nieks negali i!: imogaus iSpleSti svajonii). Per ilgas darbo valandas ir daug vaiMiodama, taip kartais uZsisvajoju apie grdus ateities dalykus, kad net kartais pamirStu apie dabarties sunkurnus.
La~jojeikina gana daug idorniil hygy, labai didelis muzikaiinis teatralinis gyvenimas. Pas mus beveik nieko. Su dideliu malonumu perskaitiau TamulaiMo knyga 227 vaikams "Viena karî$"' Ideologiniu ativilgiu Si tq galima prikiSti. Bendrai, knyga labai gera.
"Be Suniuko padauios", tai antra bene geriausiy vaib poros knygos.
Netekau labai artimos drauges, kuri iiauriai nukamuota mire. Tai buvo 22 sausio.'O
Pirmq dien4 niekur nerûsdavau sau vietos. Bet gyvenu, nes imogus matyti yra didele bestija ir egoistas. TaEiau diiaugsmas, kaip pirmiau, iS visos sielos nebemoku. 0,kos baisus tas gyvenimas!
Daug apie noréciau su Tavim pakalbeti, bet . . .
Bük sveikas, brangus Kazeli. Nors retkareiais paraSyk man ir ne visai pamirSk.
Pasiilgusi Taves Ona
Geriausiq linkejimi) broliui.
?nu [igq
Dear, sweet Kazys! after your letter with New Year's greetings I haven't heard a word from you. Though it's true that 1 only wrote to you in January. But the thing is that I'm so short of tirne. 1 haven't forgotten you. Recently I've become anxious as to whether you're alive and well. Write me a few words at least. How are you, anything new?
1 wanted to get a letter to you through Kazirnieras. 1 imagine you watered your patron weii, since the govcrnment isn't being skimpy with alcohol. It's a big loss for non-drinkers, as the price of alcohol has faiien dramaticaiiy. I didn't write you then because 1 was running around the whole city with my tongue hanging out to get some shoes with my order. It was
l0 Here Simaite is refemng to Liuba Levitska. 228 ali for nothing, even though I'm walking around in shoes that are falling apart and beyond repair. They Say that you have to have connections, otherwise you won't get anything.
This year the traditional Kaziukas's Fair was a mockery. Of course, there were no bagels or hearts, even with a [magnifying glas?] nothing could be found. There weren't even any hearts made out of fabric or wood. [t's a shame. There were only some pretty dried flowers, and Eiowers made of wood. They were very beautiful and artistic. Unfortunatcly, there were even very Cew of them. 1 was amazed by the miniature fiddles for children. It seems they're made by a village master, because such beautiful sounds echoed from them when played.
It's good that it's getting warmer, and that they days are getting longer. Soon spring,
Sun and flowers will arrive. Oh, that spring may bring peace to the tired people!
Otherwise, since January 15 one good change has been made in my life: 1 have firewood. Jonas gave me 2 metres, and then SI. gave me one more metre. Then 1 got another metre for the governrnent price. Except that the cutting and chopping of it put me into very deep debt. This weighs on me like the heaviest burden. In addition to that, 1 managed to bu): a few more things at govemment prices. Unfortunately, though, govemment prices are not set according to govemment wages. And soap -the prices are criminal. But you can't build a new Europe without soap.
Otherwise, 1 suffered tembly from the cold until 15/I, 1 even got sick. Sometimes 1 go hungry, but not in the past two weeks. The worst thing is that I'm very short of tirne, and I'm nihgout of energy. Usually 1 get so tired that I can't even read in bed anymore. The one good thing is that no one can pluck out a person's dreams. During my long work hours and 229 many walks, 1 get so camed away by my dreams of the good things to corne that sometimes 1 even forget about present hardships.
Many interesting books are coming out in Latvia, and the musical, theatrical scene is very big. Here there's almost nothing. 1 read Tamulaitis's book for children "One time."
Ideologically speaking, one could raise a few concerns. In general, though, it's a very good book. And "Without the Rascal Puppy" is the other of the two best children's books.
1 lost a very close friend, who died, having been brutally tortured." That was on
January 22. The first day 1 didn't know what to do with myself. But 1 continue to live, because man is evidently a big beast and an egoist. I'm no longer, however, capable of experiencing joy with my entire sou1 like before. Oh, how wretched this life is!
I'd like IO talk to you about so many things, but. . .
Take care, dear Kazys. At least write to me from time to time, and don't forget me completely.
Missing you, Ona
Best wishes to your brother.
12. Leiter to Kazys Jakubènas.
28fl11 il9431
Mielas Kazy! uijauCiu Tau labai del Tevo mirties. Ir dar negaléti nuvaZiuoti atsisveikinti paskutini kart+ Tevq viena tetunme. AS tq pati iigyvenau 1922m. O praeitais metais
See note 10 above. 230 bolkvikai dar ir seseri su vaiku iheie. Suprantu, kaip [ai skaudu yra ibgyventi, nekaibant jau apie viq kih, kas [kq] tenka dabar ibgyventi.
Labai, labai Tau dekui ui laibkq ir pinigus. Atejo kaip tik labiausia [labiausiu] reikalingu laiku, kai gavau atostogas. Jei nebüh kitq sunkiai pakeliamq dalyb, tai galeCiau tik pasidiiaugti, nes esu labai pavargusi, dabar galiu kiek pasilséti. Gavus atostogas mane labiausiai slegia, kad nebeturesiu iS ko graiinti geriems imonems 75 rn[arkiq] skolos ir pakaustyti gana naujai gautus batelius, kam buvo reikalinga 30 m. Ir Stai Tu nuemiai
[nuemei] visus rüpesCius nuo mano galvos. Pasakyti tik aëiü Tau bühj per mafai. '1 iesa dar turiu 170 m. skolos. Bet tai tamyboje ir del to man nei kiek galvq neskauda. Tu radai, Kazy, kad Tau blogai su batais. Todel leiski man grqiinti IO0 m. Tau atgal, nes be jq aS galiu apsieiti, kadangi bütiniausieji vargai, aiiiü Tau, jau prahlinti. Gerai, Kazy? Malku turiu, bulviq turiu, nes Martynas [illegible word] nesenai padovanojo. Ar daug vienarn Emogui reikia?
Maiiausia noréciau koki menesi pabüti atostogose. Tarnaujant ir daug vaikEiojant net ibimiegoti negalédama kaip reikiani. Dabar visq pirmu miegu daug, kartais net po 12 val.
Paskui gana daug vaWioju ty irnoniy reücalais. Tuos reikalus geriau sutvarkau, nes turiu daug laiko. Pastanioju metu dar iki darbo büdavo jegq pavaikSçioti, O po darbo taip sunkiai büdavo Save priversti. Dabar kas kita. AsmeniSkai sau - labai noréCiau tureti kiek ilgesnes atostogas. Net laibb tad neturejau laiko railyti. 13 Felnos gavau aliarmuojanti laiSkq, ar gyva weika esu. Zinoma, gyva, tik laiko ir jegrl nebuvo raSyti. Siandien ar ryt vel Jam paragysiu ir pasiyjiu Tau linkejimus. DuSia imogus jis. AS taip diiaugiuos, kad galejau rudeni su Juo pasimatyti ir pasikalbéti. 23 1
MoksliSkq knygil aS turiu gana daug, tatiau del matyt igytos anemijos daugiau vienos valandos negaliu, nes nebesuprantu, skaitau, greit pavargstu. Labai noretqsi paskaityti geras knygas iS beletristikos, taciau mm turtingoji, kaip ir kitos geriausios, bibliotekos, uidarytos. Filharmonija taip pat uidaryta. Sekmadieniy koncertai, tai bùdavo mano didiiausias diiaugsmas.
A3 dabar geriuosi AspazijosL2naujais eileragiais "Ziemos vakaro jvaizdis". Labai gilüs eileragiai paraSyti su dideliu meistriikumu. Kiekvienas toks brangus ir artimas d3iai.
Ten paliesti mirties ir gyvenimo kiausimai. Ga1 kitu metu tie eilèraEiai taip nejaudinly, kaip dabar, nes dabar i'S tikqju imogus non gyventi, bet jam neleidiiama gyvcnti, jis stumiamas mirtin ir begaliniam vargui . . . Skaitau iS naujo po truputi iS Sv. rash+ PerskaiEiau jau dvi knygas. Dabar treèiq skaitau. Jos man visad patikdavo, dabar dar labiau kaip tai ypatingai jos krito iau ir Sirdi.
Be miego ir vaikEiojim~,tai po truputi laiSkus raSau ir lopaus, nes juk mes dabar taip suubagejom, kad net siülas ir lopas pasidarè probletna!
Kaip gerai, kad turiu kiek daugiau laiko. Galesiu Aldutei padeti paraSyti pirmq reieraq jos gyvenime - "VergiSkumas ir laime asmeniSkame gyvenime." Liierariha mokykios patarta referatui: Forsterio "Mokk gyventi" ir PeCkauskaites "Rimries valandelis."
Teks pradeti nuo ryt dienos ir man skaityti tas knygas.
Apie labiausia noréciau kalbéti - geriau nutyleti.
Aspazija (Elza Rozenberga) (1865-1943) was a Latvian poet and dramatist. Her works indude Baltiias Vestnesis (The Baltic Messeneer), Vaidelote (The Vestal), and Sidraba Skidrauts (The Silver Veil). 232
AS pasistengsiu Tau pasiysti TamulaiÇio knygg. Nors retkartiais raSyk atvirukq, kad bent iindiau, kad sveikas, gyvas, vis lengviau bus ant duSios, negu neiinia. DaQ pinigil leisk grqiinti - pra3au. Labai Tau dekui ui nuimtus nuo mano galvos rtipestius. Biik sveikas.
Linkejimai broliui, jei &o.
Butiuoju. Ona
28AII [1943]
Dear Kazys! rny deepest sympathies to you for the death of your father. And on top of thai, not to be able to visit him to Say goodbye for the last time. We only have one father. 1 had the same experience in 1922. And last year the Bolsheviks deported my sister and her child. 1 understand how difficult this is to experience, not to mention everything else that we have to live through nght now.
Thank you very, very much for your letter and the money. It came at just the time when 1 needed it most, when 1 got a vacation. If ihere weren't al1 these things that are so hard to bear, i could enjoy it, as I'm very tired, now 1 can test a little. Now that I'rn on vacation,
I'm very stressed because 1 won't have any way of repaying the good people who lent me 75 marks, or to pay for new soles for the shoes that 1 got fairly recently, for which 1 needed 30 marks. And here you took aii of these womes off my head. To only Say thank you would not be enough. True, I stili owe 170 marks. But that's borrowed from the office, and I'm not losing any sleep over that at ali. You wrote that you have problems with your shoes, Kazys.
So let me returnlO0 marks to you. You shouid have [hem because 1 can do without, since the most pressing concerns, thanks to you, have ken done away with. OK, Kazys? 1 have 233
firewood, I have potatoes because Martynas recently gave me a [illegible word]. Does one person need much?
I'd like to take at least a month off work. Working and walking a lot, I can't even get
proper rest. Now above all I sleep a lot, sometimes even 12 hours at a time. Then I walk a fair
bit on those people's errands. I can get those errands done better because I have a lot of time.
Until recently I still had the strength to walk around before work, but after work it became so
difficult to force myself. Now this has changed. Personally, I'd really like to have some
vacation time for myself. I haven't even had time to write letters. I got an alarming letter
from Felna, asking if I was alive and well. Of course I'm alive, there just hasn't been any
time or strength to write. Today or tomorrow I'll write to him again, and I'll send you my
wishes. He's a good soul of a person. I'm so happy that I was able to meet and talk with him
in the fall.
I have quite a few scholarly books, but because of what appears to be an acquired
anaemia I can't read for any more than an hour because I no Longer understand what I'm
reading, and I get tired very quickly. I long to read some good literary books, but our library,
like the other best libraries, is closed. The symphony is also ciosed. The Sunday concerts
used to be my biggest pleasure.
Now I'm enjoying ~spazija's"new poems "A Winter Evening's Vision." They are
very profound poems written with great mastery. Each one is so dear and close to my soul.
Questions of death and life are touched on in them. Perhaps in another time period those
l3 See note 12 above. 234 poems wouldn't touch me as they do now, because now one realiy wants to live, but is not allowed to live, and is pushed toward death and endless hardship . .. I've started to read from the Bible again. I've already read hvo books. Now I'm reading the third. I've always liked them, and somehow now they've caught my eye and my heart.
Aside from sleeping and walking, little by little I'vc been writing ietters and mending my dothes, as we've becorne such beggars that even a thread and patch have become a problem!
How wonderiul to have some more time. 1'11 be able to heIp Aldute write the first essay of her life - uSlavery and freedorn in an individual's Me." The literature recommended by the school is: Forster's "Know How to Live" and Petkauskaité's "A Moment of Quiet." 1 too will have to start reading those books tomorrow.
About that which I'd like to tell you - it's better to be silent.
1'11 make an effort to send you Tamulaitis's book. Wnte me a card at least once in while, so 1 at least know that you're alive and well, it's easier on me than not knowing. Take care. Best wishes to your brother if he's back.
1 kiss you. Ona.
13. Letter to Kazys Jakubénas. lO/IX [19431
Mielas, gerasis Kazy! jau 3 savaites, kaip @au. Dêkui ui praieisîq diena drauge su Tavim.
Jq prisiminti labai maionu. Norejau Tau it a*iau paralyti, kad to laiko neimoniSkai trùksta. IIgas tarnybinis darbas ir savo ir nesavo ivak reikalai ir reikaiiukai visai nuo kojq 235 nuvaro. Per 4 trumpq lailq ir vel teko büti Liudininke baisiil dalyky. O visa tai palieka tokias sunkias, sunkias nuoedas dSioje.
Pradejau daryti uPaSus. Nemaniau, kad tiek daug tuiiu mediiagos. Vis nauji ir nauji faktai ilkila [iSkyla] i3: atrninties. Tik to laiko taip meai uiradams ir skaitymui, tarnyba ir begaliniai vaiwiojirnai visk;) surija. O gyvenimas darosi vis sunkesnis, nes atsiranda vis nauji trükumai. TaCiau ir tas dar büiy niekis, jei turetiau kiek daugiau laiko ir je netekty matyti tokias begalines irnoniq kantias.
Sugr@usi 3iiq savaite i3gulejau lovoje su temperatüra. Sugrjiusi i3gèriau nevirinto vandens ir gavau stipry pilvo gripq. TaCiau jau 10 dienq, kaip visai esu sveika.
Per viq gyvenimq pirrnq karq kelionèje mane apvoge: siotyje pcr kamsti iStrauké sketi. Ypatingai dabar, kai Lija, juntu lq rei3ikia büti be skeiiio. Prie Sios istorijos dar viena büdinga tautinio antagoninno smulkmena. Tq vagystq papasakojau drauge vaZiavusioms su manim. Tuoj del to buvo mesta kaltè visiems lenkams. TaCiau kai papasakojau, kaip vienos krautuves vedèja, didele lietuvë patriote, kuri i lenkus Ziüréti negali, nuolatos juos [illegible word] ir vija lauk, nesidrovejo iS lietuviy apgaulingu büdu igkirpti iS 3 korielii) visus saidainiy ir rnuilo talonus - iada, iinoma, visaip pradejo teisinti, ir tos demês nemete visiems lietuviams. Kartais biina labai iiùdna ir kartais tik juokti[sj norisi id irnoniy kvailumo del jq
Sovinizmo.
Maionu, kad pas mus jau prasidejo sirnfonijy koncertas. Ryt jau eisiu iantrq toki koncertq. !hipjokio kilo kultiirinio gyvenirno nei dienq su iiburiu nerasi pas lietuvius.
Lenkai neturi teisés rodytis.
Perskaitiau Albrechto "ISniekintas soçialiunas." Tikèjaus kit0 ko. Gaila, kad nebuvau perskaieiusi pries atvaziuojant pas Tave, del kai kuriy dalyb bÜQ galima buve pakalbeti.
Skaityti vienq NIJ po kito man buvo nuobodu. Perskaitiau dar "Hitlerio kovos del Reicho" ir
"Sydai ui Stalino petiq." Kaip matai, iengiu koja kojon su laiko dvasia. Ar jau perskaitei
Fuk?" Kaip Tau patiko, labai noréèiau iinoti. 6/IX turejau labai idomi) ir ilgq pasikalbejimq su vienu literatu apie St. Zweigq,16 Werfeb ir Tolle~-&'~Mes viens antram pasakojom, )(si rnum yra davq Sie raiytojai. Pasirodo, kad St. Zweigo aS daugiau iinau, o Werfelio ir Tollerio iinojirna a!: ir lygintis su juo negaliu. Pasikalbejimas buvo labai jdomus ir daug man davk
Tik vakar Feinai paraSiau laiSk+ Gavau iri Birutes jau 2 labai jdomius laigkus. Biruté raSo, kad BaltruSaitio18 "Ma4 vainiko" filosofija jai atrodo sotaus, gerai pavalgusio imogaus filosofija.
Pasitaiko proga kelioms dienoms nuvaiiuoti i Rygq. To aS labai, labai noréCiau, nors piniginiai trükumai kiek ir liepia del to pagalvoti.
l4 Presumably the letter 'N' here stands for 'Nazi.'
lS This is a transliteration of the narne "Fouché" and probably rekrs to Stefan Zweig's 1929 biography of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon Bonaparte's head of interna1 secucity.
l6 Stephan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1883. He was the author of numerous works, including Annst (1920), per Flüchtlin~e- (The Refueee) (1927), and Die Welt von Gestern (Tehy) (1941). Together with his wife, he committed suicide at Petropolis, Brazil in 1943.
l7 Ernst TolIer was boni in 1893 in Samotschen (now Samonin). Beginning in 1919 he spent five years in prison for leading socialist revolts. During his time in prison he wrotr numerous plays. In 1933 Toiler was deprived of Geman citizenship for his anti-Nazism activities. He committed suicide in New York in 1939, aiter several years of writing film scripts in California.
l8 Jurgis BaltruSaitis (1873-1944) was a symbolist poet who wrote in both Lithuanian and Russian. He became weli-known in Russian literary circles through his translations of the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Kierkegaard and others. 237
Dékui Tau, Kazi, ui viskq - ui eilèra%ius, ui dienq drauge praleistq. 0, kokios puikios roiès Alytaus parke iydi. &je, Tau ir broliui labai dekui u2 wiestq, ui laSinius. Ir dabar vis dar valgau, ypatingai sviestas buvo reikalingas po ligos. Truksta tik saldaus. Gaila, kad del tos "patriotes" man teko ir savo saldainiv netekti.
[written up the left margin] Viso gero Tau, broliui ir kimininkem. Ona
10AX [1943I
My dear, good Kazys! it's been 3 weeks since my return. Thank you for the day that we spent together. It's a great plcasure to remember it. 1 had wanted to write you earlier, but I'rn so inhutnanly pressured for time, The long hours at work, together with errands - mine and not mine - are knocking me off my feet with fatigue. In this short period of time [since my return] I've managed to witness some terrible things. And al1 of this leaves a kind of heavy, heavy sediment in my soul.
I've started making notes. 1 didn't think that I'd have so much material. More and more new facts emerge from my rnemory. But there's so little time for notes and reading, as my job and the endless walking swallow up everything. And 1iIe keeps getting more difficult, as new shortages keep popping up. But even that would be nothing, if 1 only had more time, and if 1 didn't see this kind of endless human suffering.
When 1 returned home 1 spent a whole week in bed with a fever. When 1 returned 1 drank some unboiled water and got a bad stomach flu. But I've been completeIy healthy for
10 days now.
During the trip 1 was robbed for the fitst tirne in my life: at the station my umbrella 238 was grabbed in the throng. Especialiy now, when it's raining, 1 understand what it means io be without an umbrella. Together with this story, there's one more characteristic detail [that iiiustrates] national antagonisms. 1 told the story of the robbery to the women who were travelling with me. Immediately all the blame for this was thrown ont0 al1 Poles. But when 1 told them about one store manager -a woman who is a big Lithuanian patriot who can't even bear to look at Poles, and who is constantly [illegible word] [hem and chasing them out ol her store, and who had the gali to cut out al1 the candy and soap ration cards out of three books belonging to Lithuanians in a sneaky way - then, of course, they began to justiiy it in al1 sorts of ways, and didn't cast that blame onto al1 Lithuanians. Sometimes it makes me very sad, and sometimes 1 just want to laugh at people's stupidity in terms of their prejudices.
It's nice that the symphony has already started its concerts here. Tomorrow I'm going to my second such concert. Otherwise there's no other cultural life to be found, not even with a lantem amongst the Lithuanians. The Poles have no right to show thernselves in public.
1 read Albrecht's "Socialism Humiliated." 1 expected something different. It's a shame ihat 1 hadn't read it before coming to see you, we could have discussed some things.
Reading one NI9 after another bored me. 1 also read "Hitler's Battles for the Reich" and
"Jews at Stalin's Side." As you can see, I'm keeping in step with the spirit of the times. Havc you read Fouchém yet? I'd love to know how you liked it. On September 6' 1 had a very
l9 See note 14 above.
"See note 15 above. 239 interesting and long conversation with one literary scholar about S. Zweig:' Werfel and
Tollep. We told each other what each of us got from these writers. It turns out that 1 know more of S. Zweig's work, while in terms of Werfel and Touer, 1 of course am not even in the same category as him. The conversation was very interesting and gave me a great deal.
1 only wrote Felna a leiter yesterday. 1 got two very interesting letters from Birute.
Birute writes that to her BaltruSaitis'su philosphy in "The Wreath of Tears" seems to be that of a stufied, well-ied person.
1 have the opportunity to go to Riga for a iew days. 1 would really. really like to do that, though financial shortages are making me think twice about it.
Thank you for everyihing, Kazys - for the poems, for the day spent together with you.
Oh, what beautiiul roses are blooming in Alytus Park. By the way, thank you and your brother for the butter and the bacon. I'm still eating them now, the butter was especially needed after my illness. I'm just craving something sweet. Unfortunately, because of that
"patriot" 1 didn't get my sweets either.
[written up the left marginl Best wishes to you, your brother, and the housekeepers. Ona
14. This is a letter written by Ona Simaite from Paris to her niece, Marijona Cilvinaitè, in
Kaunas. As the date shows, this letter was written after the war and after simaite's
See note 16 above.
t2 See note 17 above.
23 See note 18 above. internment in Dachau. Both simaite and Cilvinaité were libracians.
1957-X-2d
Mieloji Maryte! atleisk, kad kick uittukau su atsakyrnu Tau. Tavo laiskas mane labai sujaudino. Didiiausiq Tau aèiü, kad davei mano adreq Taydai. Ta mergiote tiek daug skairiiy pragiedruliv jne'Sé man gyvenimam.
Mieloji Maryte! kiek daug Tu pati ir Tavo artimieji yra iSkentéjq! Sunku be ahry buvo skaityti tuos baisus karo mety Tavo atsiminimus. Kas tame pragare mane labiausiai stebina, tai imoniv solidarumas padeti kitam. O kas su Tavo Tèveliu atsitiko, Tu man nieko nerasai. NoreBau, kad bùw gyvas, sveikas, nes mes abudu, taip sakant, iydp Mausimç, vienmineiai, ir vienBirdiiai . . . Jei gyvas, nusilenk jam iemai nuo rnanqs. Jei mires - tcbüna jam lengva Lietuvos iemele!
Taip daug noréeiau Tau paragyti, ir net neiinau nuo ko pradèii. Na, vienarnc laigke, iinoma, visko pasakyti negalesiu, tai tegu liks kitiems. Manau, kad iai ne pirmas, ir ne paskutinis laif kas.
Pirmiausia, mane labai diiügina, kad Tu dirbi mylirnq darbq. ir netuci jokiy matecialiniy rüpeEiq. Tebüna Tau, Maryte, visad gerai.
Man dideh malonurnq suteike IaiSke prideta ~teleir lauh gklelè.
Ar buvo Tayda? Gerai isivaizdinu, kaip ji diiaugési, radus Bibliotekoj mediiagos apie
Sal. Mes visi Jai privaiorne padeti, kiek beigaiedami.
ZJ Sdomeja Neris (Baeinskaité-BuCiené) (1904-1945) was a neorornantic Lithuanian poet, whose works include Sirdis (Mv Heact - Sones of the Storms), Sesuo ivdroii. Viliia (Azure Sister. Viliia). Neris turned away from the Catholic press, where her writing career had begun, and began to work with the avant-garde publication TreCias Pridedu Chomskiui kelis iodelius. Biauru, kad esama tokiv imoniq pasaulyje. Tas
IaiSkelis vien pries Prietelius apgins Tavo garbq. Bet iS viso matyti, kad tai toks imogus, kuris megsta svetimq turq, ir jo neatiduos. Pavartos visas priemones, kad palikti pas Save.
Geriau, Tu su Juo nesusidèk. Jei tokia €onna netinka, kokioj dabar paragiau, kitame laiSke pagal tavo nurodymq paragysiu, kaip reikiant.
Man sunku yra Tau rdyti, nes berabnt kyla tiek atsiminimy . . . Po savo suémimo, a3 iki Siai dienai [Sios dienos] nieko neiinau, kas buvo toliau. Paprastai, hitlerininkai viskq konfiskuodavo, ir igkraustydavo iS kambario. Man ui vis labiausia rüpi likusios namuose kai kurios knygos, mano ir ne mano rankraeiai. Ar liko nuo ty daik~,kas nors mano kambaryje.
Kaip tytia prie3 savo suemimq aS aisineSiau iS Petrauskaités savo eiliv knygutes rankrafiti. Ai taip norèeiau tai turèti.
Pas "Sakalq" liko pasakos "Cipango sala" (rankrastis). Kas su juo? Gaila, man ir frontas (The Third Front), published by a Ieftist group of writers who opposed the Sinetona regime. In her journal entry of October 30, 1922, Neris describes an encounter with Ona Simaite, to whom she refers as "ta mergelé" 'that girl.' Later, after this strange encounter, it seems Neris and Simaite became better acquainted through a rnutual friend, poet Kazys Botuta:
"Tos mergelès aS nepaijstu, nors jinai müq bendrabuty gyvena; jq tik kai kada virtuvej tenka matyti. Ateina ji Siandien j müq kambai ir praSo manes ikiti . . . &a staiga netiketai apsikabina mane ir buliuoja, bueiuoja su aSaromis akyse . . . Perskaicius A. mana eilèraEius, ir taip patikg, kad apsiverkus, persiraliius ir atejus man padekoti. Man keista ir nejauku pasidare."
'1 don? know that girl, even though she Iives in our residence; 1 only see her from time to tirne in the kitchen. She comes to ouroom today and asks me to step outside . . . Suddenly she throws her amaround me, and starts kissing me, kissing me with tears in her eyes . . . Mer reading my poems in A., she cried and copied them out, and then came to thank me. It made me feel strange and uncorniortable' (126). 242 Herminijos ziir [sic.] Mühlen iSvers~pas* (rankraityje) - kur jos?? - Daug ko labai gaila.
Jei Tu fiai, Q nors apie tai pasilenk man paraSyti.
Atsiminimq apie Vilniaus geto as nesu raSiusi Vilniuje bünant, bet hi kuriuos uiraSus dariau. Turejau ir gana vertingos mediiagos (mano nuomone) gautos iS geto, ir 200 laiSb, raSyty man iS geto. Zinojo apie tai U dar kai kurie imonés, kur jie yra. ktjie man praneSè, kad karas viskq sunaikino. Pas mane vistiek dar liko kai kurios abejones. Tai ar iuvo, arba kas nors paeme. Tau, Maryte, aS pasitikiu 100%. Jei Tu galétum paauko ti kick laiko, ir nors patikrinti tai, kas buvo paslepta Univ. Lituanistikos seminare. Ga1 [os visos pastangos nueis veltui. Büty be galo gaila, jei viskas yra dingç. Jei tikrai gali padeti, tai padek ir kitame lai5ke praneSiu, kur ieSkoti. Nors kartoju, jog maiai vilties, kad kas nors liko.
Begyvenant Prancüzijoje aS buvau bçpradejusi raSyti apie Vilniaus ghetto. Visa béda, kad aS 2inau labai daug, O viso to uiraSyti aS nepajegiu. O dabar, tai ir didelio reikalo néra tame, nes pasakys, likq gyvi iydai, taip yra viskq apra@, kad vien stebètis reikia.
IS IO,kq a5 esu paraiSusi, man labiausia pavyko skyrius "Mana susiraSinejimas su
Lmonemis Vilniaus geto". Tai yra iriversta iydy ir hebrajg kalbomis ir atspausdinta.
Tas, kas mano paraSyta, nonu sutvarkyti ir man tq masinéle priiadejo Haifoje p. Jaffa, iinomo poeto Zmona. Ji juos penaSys, pasiys i4 Izraelio organizacijas, O taip pat i kai kuriuos pasauiinius [sic.] iydu organizacijas. PapraSysiu juos paraSyti dar vienq egz. ir Tac.
Lietuvos Universiteto Bibliotekai.
Noriu paraSm rnedZiag4 sutvarkyti iki naujq meril - ar pavyks, neiinau. Bet daugiau, negu parsyta, nieka neberaSysiu.
Atskiri mano straipsneiiai apie Vilniaus ghetto yca atspausdinti iydy spaudoje 243
Amerikoje, Argentinoje, Izraelyje ir Piety Afrikoje, O taip [pat] Paryiiuje. Bet originaly a5 pas Save neturiu. Parahu ir atiduodu Lig LaiSkq.
Iwaelyje man buvo suteikta pensija ir pastoge iki gyvos galvos. Bet aS sirgau nuo karEiy. Griiau po 3 mety atgal i ParyZiv.
Cia büdavo man protarpiais neapsakomai sunku. Bet uftat fia taip lengvai yra prieinami pasaulines kultüros meno Iobiai, ir a3 jais naudojuos pilna saujimi.
Dabar rnano gyvenimas irgi Jiek palengvejo. Viena iydy organizacija man suteike stipendijq iki naujy meb. Taigi dirbu bibliotekoje vien 3 dienas, O viq kit4 laikq po savislaugos ir darbo bibliotekoje, noriu sunaudoti uiraSy sutvarkyrnui, laiski) raSymui, siuvimo pamoki) ruoSimui. Noréëiau, kaip galirna daugiau padaryti, ui vis labiausia bijau ligq. Ir dabar mane gripas stipiriai paëiupo.
Tai laiskas paraSytas ant greityjy. 0, Maryte, kokiose idorniose ir jvairiuose privaëiose bibiiotekose esu aS dirbusi. Padirbu vienoje kelis menesius, veliau rnane rekomenduoja i kit+ Nepaprastai daug sutvarkiau tose bib-ose apie menq, ypatingai iS jy liko atmintyje, anglas Srnidtas (jo anglies piesiniai) vokieëiq impresionistai, ir visa medliaga apie
Goyq, nuo ty laiky, kada jis dar gyveno. Vienoje bibliotekoje biblioteka buvo sutvarkyta pagal didelio garlaivio konstrukcija. Bendrai, kiekvicname mieste lankiau dideles bibliotekas.
Bet dabar jau to nebepajegiu, arba su didwausiu vargu. Labai blogai man betarnauja kojos.
Na, bük meika. Tiu, dar paraSyti. Ir Tu man raSyk.
BuCiuoju. Ona 244
Dear Maryte! forgive me for taking so long to answer. Your letter moved me very much. A huge thank you to you for giving my address to Tayda. That girl brought so many moments of biightness into my life.
Dear Maryte! how much you and your loved ones have suffered! It was difficult to
read your remembrances of those terrible war years without tears. What surpiises me most
about that hell, is people's solidarity in helping others. But you write nothing about what
happened to your father. 1 would very much like for him to be alive and healthy, because the
two of us were of one mind and one heart when it came to, as they Say, the Jewish question . .
.If he's alive, bow down low to him for me. If he's dead - may the sweet earth of Lithuania
lie lightly on him!
There's so much 1 would iike to write to you about, and 1 don? even know where to
start. Of course, 1 won? be able to tell you everything in one letter, so the rest will remain Tor
others. 1 think this is neither the first nor the last letter.
First of all, it makes me very happy that you are working in the beloved profession,
and that you have no material wotries. May you always be well, Maryte.
The sprig of rue and the wildflower enclosed in the letter brought me great pleasure.
Did Tayda corne to see you? 1 can imagine well how happy she was to find material
about Sal. NerisYs We are aii obiigated to help her as much as we can.
I'm enclosing a few words for Chomskis. It's disgusting that there are people iiithat
in the world. That note will only defend your honour against friends. But from everything
- --
ZS See note 26 above. 245 one can see that this is the kùid of person who covets another's wealth and won't give it back. He'll use any means possible to keep it. It's better for you not to get involved with him.
If the fom in which I've written it is not appropriate, 1'11 write another proper one according to your instruction.
It's difficult for me to write to you, because so many memories arise as 1 write . . .
Until this day 1 have no idea what happened after my arrest. Normally the Hitlerists used to confiscate everything and empty out one's room. I'm most of al[ concerned about some books and manuscripts - some mine, others not mine - that were left at home. Did any of these things get leit behind in my room? It happened that just belore rny arrest 1 had brought home the manuscript of rny book oî poetry from Petrauskaite's. 1 would like to have it so much.
The stories "Cipangas's Island" (manuscript) was left with sak ka la^."^^ What happened to him? i'm also sorry for the translations of Hermanija zür [sic] Mühlen's stories
(in the manuscript) - where are they?? - I'm sorry for a great many things. If you know anything about these things, sit down to write to me.
1 didn't write any memoirs about the Vilnius ghetto while 1 was [still] in Vilnius, but i did make some notes. 1 actually had some material that 1 had collected in the ghetto, and it (in my opinion) was quite valuable, as well as 200 letters that had been written to me from the ghetto. Some other people knew where 1 had put them. But they informed me that the war destroyed everything. Nevertheless, 1 have some doubts. Perhaps they were destroyed, or
26 This is an dias meaning "Falcon." Partisans often used such aliases. 246 perhaps someone took them. Maryte, 1 trust you 100%. If you could dedicate sorne time and at least check for what 1 hid in the Lithuanian Philology seminar roorn at the University. It may aU be for nothing. It would be an incredible shame if everything had disappeared. If you really can help, then help, and in the next letter 1'11 tell you where to look. But 1 repeat - there's Little hope that anything survived.
While Living in Pans 1 had started to write about the Vilnius ghetto. The problern is that 1 know a great deal, but I'rn unable to write it al1 down. And now there's no great need for me to do so, since the surviving Jews will tell it, and they have alrcady written about it to such an extent that one can only marvel.
Of what I've written, the section "My Correspondance with the People of the Vilnius
Ghetto" turned out the best. It has been translatcd into Yiddish and Hebrew and published.
I'd Iike to clean up what I've written, and Mrs. Jaffa, the wife of a well-known poet in
Haifa, has prornised to type it for me. She will transcribe it, send it to 4 Israeli organizations, as well as to some international Jewish organizations. 1'11 ask her to make one more copy for the Soviet Lituanian University Library.
1 want to fix up the written material by the New Year - 1 don't know whether or not
I'U be successful. But 1 won't write any more than I've already written.
Different articles of mine about the Vilnius ghetto have been published in the Jewish
press in America, Argentina, Israel and South Africa, as well as in Paris. But 1 don? have the
originaIs anymore. 1 write [hem and then give them away like letters.
In Israel 1 was given a pension and accommodation until they day 1 die. But 1 was sick
from the heat. I retumed to Paris after 3 years. 247
At times Life was indescribably difficult for me here. But since the world's artistic treasures are so accessible here, 1 help myself to them by the handful.
Now my life has become somewhat easier. A certain Jewish organization has given me a stipend until the New Year. So now 1 work at the library only 3 days, and after taking care of my health and the library work, I want to use the rcmaining time to clean up my notes, to write letters and to prepare my sewing lessons. I'd like to get as much done as possible, 1 fear sickness more than anything. Even now the flu has taken strong hold of me.
This is a letter written in haste. Oh, Maryte, what interesting and varying libtaries I've worked in. 1 work in one for a few months, then latcr on I'm recommended to another. 1 organized an incredible amount of material on art in those libraries, the Englishman Smith
(his charcoal drawings), the German impressionists, and al1 the material about Goya from the time when he was still alive have especially stayed in my memoty. One library was organized according to the construction of a steamship. Generally, 1 used to visit al1 the big libraries in every city. But now 1 don't have the strength to do that anymore, except with the greaiest difficulty. My legs work vcry badly now.
Weii, take care. 1 plan to write again. And you write to me.
1 kiss you. Ona
15. Letter to Marijona Cilvinaite.
1957 -XII - 17d.
Mieloji Maryte! paiadejau Tau paraSyti greit laiski+ O prabego laiko upes ù ne Zodelio. Bük tokia gera atleisk man ilgq tylejiw. Besiartinaneiv Naujv MeQ proga pagal gra@ paproti noriu Tau palidceti stiprios sveikatos, ir daug geq ir graiiq gyvenimo pro&aisÇig.
Prancuzijoje iprasta N. Metams dovanoti kalendorelius + dar nors. O aJ tegaliu pasiqsti
Tau, Brangioji, vien maiyti kalendorefi. Kiekvienai bibliotininkei kiekvienas spaudinys yra
brangus. Taigi priimk Si maZyteQ kakndorëu nuoJirdiiai, kaip aG ji Tau siuneiu.
Nebeiinau, Maryte, kaip Tau atsidékoti ir kokiais iodiiais tai iSreikSti ui tai kad Tu
davei Taydai mano adreq. AS su dideliu jtempirnu sekiu dideli kulturini gyvenimq, kuris
vyksta Taryby Lietuvoje. Turéti graiius spaudos leidinius - tai pripildo gyvenimo dienas. AS
lenkiuos prie€ Emones, atliekantius toki dideh kuttürini darbq.
Ji man atsiuntë vadovq "Kaunas." IT, jo daug suirinojau ir pamatiau nematyto, kas vel
mane taip stipriai nudiiugino. Ypatingai diiaugiuos, kad Kauno Universiteto Bibliotekoje yra
toks turtingas ranktastynas.
Vasario men. aS pateksiu i seneliq prieglaudq, kur büsiu aprüpinta maistu, turksiu
atskirq kambareu. Tada aS sutvarkysiu tuos uiraius, kuriuos esu parahsi ir atsipiu i
Bibliotekos rankr&iy skyriy. Bet jie yra paraSyti rusi) kalba. Man atrodo, kad tabiausia
vykusi skyrius yra Moa nepemcna c m)&mBmeHcKoro [sic.] r3m". NOCStikriau gai
bütq pavadinti "nnbc~amgeL ir3 aHneHcKoro rsrro". A3 labai noréciau, kad tas pateb i
rankraSi4 skyriy. SmogedriSkos praeities negaiha pamirSti. Pirm. negu pateksiu i seneliu
prieglaudq negaliu CO darbo irntis. Vos-vos pakanka jegy uisidirbti duo4 kasdienine ir atlikti
visus savislaugos darbus.
Parninetas ralSinys apie 41 pusl. buvo atspausdintas iydq kalboje, taip pal, kaip ir
"nr06a .bearc~an- nnoco~roseii" moten) darbininkiy iumale hebrajy kalboje. Jei ragote
kad tai verta laikyti rankraEiu skyriuje, - pasiwiu ir kito, kq esu paraSiusi, kai sutvarkysiu. O tuo tarpu reikia palaukti.
Maiai vilties, kad kas nors liko, kq buvau paslepusi Vilniaus Lituanistikos seminaro bibliotekoje. hojo apie tai ir kiii imonès, ir turbüt senai ii%me, ir gal, iS baimés ar kitq prieiasCiq sunailcino. Maiai vilties, O tatiau Sie dalykai man labai riipi. Nieks geriau Tavçs
neiino, Lituanistikos serninaro patalpg. Bük toki gera, prasisvesk, atvaiiuok 1 dienai i Vilniu.
O gal ten dar kas tekgdi. Kai iki~iS serninaro po laiptais yra rna2as sandelis. Ten buvo
visokie rakandai. Po tq rakandv buvau paslepusi laiPkus raSytus man iS Vilniaus getto, kai
kuriuos savo uraSus - pastabas, O taip pat keiios laikraSCio ibkarpos. Jei bü~ioks stebüklas, ir
büQ kas uisilik~s- nieko neiSmesk be manes, ir aS Tau paaiSkinsiu kodel yra ta ar kita
laikra9tinè iSkarpa pridèta. Pasikelk laipteliais i pastogq - ir ten iS desines pues, kur stogas
nusileidiia [a tiny diagram is drawn here] yra ufkasta geleiiné deiute, kurioje yra G. ho
uiraSai apie Vilniaus geto. Man pasakojo, kad tos pastoges ncbéra, nes nukentêjo nuo karo.
Bec a3 kodel tai netikiu tam. Labai noréfiau, kad tai bütq rasta, nors praejo tiek daug metil.
Pasistenk tai paieskoti. Jeigu nieko neberastum, tai nefipèk ui padetas pastangas. Maiai
vilties, O vis tiek dar koks tai krisielis vilties - O gal yra? Manau, kad mane gerai supranti.
(Wrinen up the margin) Ar pavyko sutvarkyti reikalus su Chomskiu? Bük sveika, padek man.
BuCiuoju. NuoSirdZiai Ona
1957-XII-17
Dear Maryte! 1 promised to write you a letter prompily. But rivers of time have Eiowed by
and not a word. Be so good as to forgive me my long silence. On the occasion of the
upcoming New Year, 1 want to wish you good health, and many good and beautifd rays of 250 life. In France it's tradition to give Little calendars + a little something for New Year's. But 1 can only send you, Dearest, a small little calendar. Every prinled item is dear to every librarian. Therefore, accept this smali calendar as sincerely as [ send it to you.
1 don't know how to thank you, Maryte, and how to express my gratitude for giving
Tayda my address. I'm following with great tension the big cultural life that is happening in
Lithuania. Having beautifui periodicals - it mis my Me's days. 1 bow down to the people who are accomplishing such great cultural work.
She sent me one reierence book [called] "Kaunas." 1 learned a lot irom it and saw things I've never seen before, which once again brought me great joy. t'm especially happy that the Kaunas University Library has such a rich manuscript collection.
In February I'm entering a home for the elderly, where 1 will receive my meals and will have my own fittle roorn. Then 1'11 organize those notes that I've written and send them to the Library's manuscript department. But they're written in Russian. 1 think that the most successful one is "My Correspondance with the People of the Vilnius Ghetto." Though it would have been more accurate to cal1 it "Letters from People of the Vilnius Ghetto."27 1 would very much Like for this to make it to the manuscript department. The cannibalistic past must not be forgotten. i can't undertake this work until 1 enter the home. 1 barely have enough strength to earn my daily bread and to take care of rny personal heath care.
The text that i was telling you about above is about 41 pages long and was published
These hvo tities are written in Russian in the original letter. 25 1 in Yiddish, as well as "Liuba Levitski -Nightingale of the Ghett~,"~'which appeared in a wornen's worker magazine in Hebrew. If you write me that it's worth keeping these in the manuscript departrnent, I'U send you some other things I've written as well, once I've finished cleaning it up. but for now, it will have to wait.
There's little hope that anything is left of what 1 had hidden in the Lithuanian
Philology seminar room's iibrary. Other people knew about it as well, and they probably removed it and perhaps, out of fear or for other reasons, destroyed it. There's little hope, but these things are very important to me. No one knows the Lithuanian philology serninar roorn better than you. Be so kind as to take a day off and corne to Vilnius. It's possible that something's still lying there. When you exit the seminar, there's a small cellar under the stairs. There used to be al1 kinds of things there, 1 had hidden the lettcrs written to me, sorne of my notes -observations, as well as some newspaper clippings under those tools. If by some miracle something were left - don't throw anything away without me, and 1'11 explain to you why this or that newspaper clipping is included. Go upstairs to the attic - and on the right, where the roof slopes down [a tiny diagram is drawn here], there's a metal box buried, which contains G. Suras's notes about the Vilnius ghetto. 1 was told that this attic is no longer there, that it was damaged by the war. But for some reason 1 don't believe it. 1 very much want for these things to be found, even though so many years have gone by. Try to look for them. If you didn't find anything, don't regret your efforts. There's little hope, but there's still some sort of tiny crystal of hope - maybe something's there? 1 think you
- - -- a This title is written in Russian in the original. understand me well.
(Written up the margin) Did you succeed in fixing things with Chomskis? Takc care, help
me. 1 kiss you. Sincerely Ona.
16. This is the tiny diagram that Simaite drçw in the above Ietter (17 Dccember 1957).
17. Letrcr to Marijona cilvinaite.
Mieloji Tautosaka-Maryte! Tavo brangy nuojirdy lailkq, raSytq [V - 7d.. senai gavau.
Sujaudino Jis mane labai, nrr iwo pasku~ineviltis. A6iü Tau, Bibliotekos Direkioriui
ir mielajarn Benelioniui ui padetas pastangas. Man labai skaudu. AS iaip ir maniau, kad
nieko nebus, nes apie rankraëio vie4 iinojau ne ai3 viena. Ga[ juos iStu3tino iuoj, kai buvau
suirnta. Po karo vienas Lmogus pasakojo, kad ir stogo ten nebèra. Pasirodo, kad seminaro
pastoge nêra nukentéjusi. O ihe3ti viq tai buvo taip ririkinga. Kitose vietose, kur kas buvo,
iinau, kad bombq sunaikinta. Zuvo ne vien rankragiai, bet ir Wnones. D-iiugu, kad
Lituanistikos seminaro patalpos priglaude 2 Szmones. Apie 2 paras isbuvo ten prof. 253
MorSoviCius, ir 7 '/z menesius isgyveno ten paslepta studenté Salia Waksman. Abu iriliko gyvi. Mielajam Beneiioniui tekdavo sukti gaiva ir jtikinti, kad man, bibliotekos tarnautojai, sveikatos ativilgiu yra daktaro isakyta kas ryt Sluoti seminarq ir jo laiptus. %aip ar taip ir lis,
Berzeiionis, yra prisidéjq s prie vienos gyvybés iSgelbéjimo. Tai Jam tebüna geriausias mano linkejirnas.
O, Maryte, kokie tai baisiis buvo laikai. Man paèiai kartais rodosi, kad tai gyvenime negalejo bûti, O vien Siurpas sapnas. [. . .I
Bük sveika Brangioji Marytc. Myiek mane su visomis mano ydomis.
But5iuoju.
NuoSirdiiai Tavo
Ona
1958-11-5
Dear Folktale-Maryte!lg 1 received your sweet, sincere letter writien on May 7" a long time ago.
It moved me very much, because with it my final hope died. I thank you, the library's director, and dear Berzelionis for your efforts. It's very painfui for me. 1 thought that nothing would be left, because 1 was noi the oniy one who knew where the manuscript was hidden.
Maybe it was emptied out of there as soon as I was arrested. Mer the war one person had told me that the roof wasn't even there anymore. Apparently, the seminar roof hasn't suffered
29 "Tautosaka" 'Folktaie' is Simaihi's idiosyncratic term of endement for her niece. 254 at all. And to bring al1 that out [of the ghetto] was so risky. 1 know that the other hiding places were destroyed by bombs. Not only manuscripts perished, but people as well. It makes me happy that the seminar room gave shettec to two peopte. Prof. MorSovièius stayed there for two days and two nights, and Salia Waksman, a student in hiding, lived there for 7 '/z months. Both survived. Dear Berzeiionis had to scheme and convince [the other library workers] that 1, a library employee, was under doctor's orders to sweep the seminar room and its staircase for health reasofis. Sornehow or other, even he, krzelionis has contributed 10 the saving of one life. Let this be my best greeting to him.
Oh, Marytè, what terrible times those were. Sornetimes it seems impossible that this could have happened in my Me, that it's just a chilting dream .[. , .]
Take care, Dear Maryte. Love me with al1 my faults.
Kisses.
Sincerely yours,
Ona
Chapter Three:
18a. IS J. Baranausko ~arodvmq
Pirmoje atvarytyjy grupeje buvo apie 30 imaniq. 1juos Saudéme iS 20 m. Mûsi) grupe q ka- sugaude apie 300 imonib daugiausia vyq. Brnéme sdaudytqjq daiktus. AS paemiau du lagaminus, kuriuose bwo du vyriTiki kostiumai, vienas vyriSkas paltas, chromo auliniai batai, moteriSk sukneliy, vyrisb vixSutiniy ir apatiniy baltiniq, atra- moteriSkiems paltams, du laikrodiiai - vienas rankinis ir vienas kikninis - ir kiti daiktai, kuriuos nuveiiau namo. (24: 1966)
From J. Baranauskas's testimonv
In the first group of people who'd been marched in there were about 30 people. We
shot at them from 20 metres away, they were mostly men. We took the shot people's
belongings. 1 took two suitcases in which there were two men's suits, one men's jacket,
chrome-tipped boots, some women's dresses, men's undershirts and underpants, patterns t'or
women's coats, NO watches -one pocket and one wrist -and other ihings which I took
home.
18b. II: J. Baranausko varodvmy
Kai buvo susaudyta 12.000 Zmoniy, paèmiau daug jiems priklausiusiu vertingy
daikty: du kostiumus, aulinius batus, pusbaeius, moteriSkq blilq, moteriikq Iijemini palq,
vaikiSkq pükini paltukq kkriq meti) vaikui, dvi poras rnoteriilkq batq, dvi poras vaikiSkq
batuki) ir kailinius. (39: 1966; repeated on 40: 1966)
Ftom J. Baranauskas's testimony
When 12 000 people had ken shot, 1 took many of their valuable belongings: two
suits, a pair of low boots, shoes, a wornan's scarf, a woman's winter coat, a child's down coat
that would fit a six year old, two pairs of wornen's shoes, two pairs of children's shoes and
fur coats. 19.12: J. Barkausko uarodvmu
Apie 1942 m. lapkritio menesi paemiau 7 iydus ir veieme i kalejirnq durpes. Tuornet jie uipuoie mane, perskele galvq, perpiove peiliu gerkle ir pabego. (129: 1966)
From J. Barkauskas's testimonv
Around November of 1942 1 took 7 Jews to transport peat to the prison. Then the y attacked me, split my head open, slit my throat and ran away.
20.12: A. Galdikausko ~arodvrny
Visus ahfestus [sic.] imones, nepaisydami jq riksmo ir verksrno, sustateme prie duobes. Pasitraukq nu0 jy 20 m. paleidome salve Süvii). Saudydarnas iSSoviau 5-6 kartus. Tq dienq sufaudiiau 4-5 imones. SuSaudyh@ tarpe buvo seniy, moterq ir vaih.
Sufaudq imones, uisirukeme ir nuvaiiavome namo i Rietavéj. (108: 1966)
From A. Galdikauskas's testimonv
We lined al1 those who had been brought in by the pit, ignoring their screams and cries. Moving back 20 metres, we fired a round of bullets. 1 shot 5 or 6 times. That day 1 shot
4-5 people. Arnongst the victims there wcre old people, women and children.
Once we'd shot the people, we had a smoke and drove home to Rietava.
21.15 Naudiiiüno ~arodvm~
Po Saudymy IX forto virSininkas Juozas Sliesoraitis Û jam pavaldk priiiüretojai 257
Saudeme ir uZmuSinejome suieistuosius, senius, moteris ir vaikus. Dainai, kai suieistuosius uikasdavome, iS po iemes buvo girdeti jq dejavimai.
Veliau i IX for& atvare uisienieEiq - austq, Eekq, prancun). Pirmoji jq gcupe, 4000 irnoniq - suaugusiq, seneliq[,] moteq ir vaib - atvyko 1941 m. gruodiio menesi. Visi 4000 buvo susaudyta [sic.].
1941 m. gruodiio 15 d. buvo atveita antra grupé, rnaidaug 3000 uisienietig, kurie visi, kaip ir pirmieji, buvo sufaudyti.
1941 m. gruodiio rnénesi atveie daugiau kaip 100 ru9 ir lietuviy. 'TreCioje duobëje juos visus apliejo benzinu ir gyvus padege.
Po io, kai Slicsoraitis 1943 metais pasitrauké if IX forto, jis ui prisiplékq aukq ir suSaudytq pilieCiil daiktus nusipirko su namais, ükiniais pastatais ir galvijais. (65: 1966)
After the shootings in the IX Fort, together with the commander Iuozas Sliesoraitis, those of us under his command shot and killed the injured, the old, the women and children.
Often when we buried the injured, we could hear their cries irom under the eacth.
Later, foreigners were brought to the IX Fort - Austrians, Czechs, French. The first group of them, 4 000 people - adults, old people, women and children - amved in December of 1941. AU
4 000 were shot.
On December 15,1941 a second group was brought in, about 3 000 foreigners, al1 of whom, like the hst group, were shot. 258
In December of 1941 more than 100 Russians and Lithuanians were brought. They were al1 splashed with gasoiine in the third pit and set on fire alive.
After Sliesoraitis left the IX Fort in 1943, he bought himself farm property with houses, farm buildings and livestock using the gold and belongings he stole from the citizens who'd been shot.
22. Rusu ir lenku petai
(IS Kauno apskrities virSininko BortkeviCiaus jsakymo Nr. 4159)
Kauno miesto komisaro isakymu visi sovietq rusai, kurie atvyko iS SSSR i Lietuvq nuo 15d. geguies men. 1940 m., lenkai, kurk atvyko iS Lenkijos i Lietuvq nuo Id. sausio men. 1939m., nepriklausomai nuo to, ar jie per tq laikq gavloj Lietuvos pilietybe ar ne, taipgi ir mai3ytos kirnos: a)kurios vyras ar imona yra soviety rusai, b) kurios vyras yra tenkas, atvykgs iS Lenkijos po Id. sausio mén, 1939 m., gyv. Kauno mieste, Sm. IapktiCio men. 10d. turi ihikraustyti ijiems skirtas vietas Vilijampoleje. (11: 1966)
Russian and Polish -ghettos
(From order Ml59 of the Kaunas region chief BortkeviCius)
By order of the Kaunas city commissar, aii Soviet Russians who have entered
Lithuania from the USSR since May 15,1939, Poles who have entered Lithuania from
Poland since January 1, 1939, regardless of whether or not they have received Lithuanian citizenship since their arrival, and also rnixed families a) in which the husband or wife is a
Soviet Russian, b) in which the husband is a Pole having arrived from Poland after January 1, 259
1939 and who live in the city of Kaunas must move to designated areas in Vilijampolé on
November 10 of this year.
W. IL liudininkes A. Maciencs ~arodvmy
. . . Ciiinauskas tada pasakojo, jog Kontautas rnasinio Saudymo metu labai Ziauriai elgesi, taëiau kaip, jis nepasakojo. Tq dienq, nerades CiZinausko namuose, Kontautas praSé mane leisti iaikinai palikti mano bute kapdiukq tabakui laikyti. A3 jam leidau tai padaryti.
Atidariusi kapdiukq, pamaëiau, kad ten buvo SeSi vestuviniai iicdai ir kiti daiktai. Rytojaus dienq Kontautas savo kapSiukq pasiémt'. (87: 1966)
From the witness A. Maciené's iestimony
. . . Ciiinauskas told me at that time that during the mass shootings. Kontautas had behaved extremely cruelly, but he didn't Say what he meant by that. That day. not having found Ciiinauskas at home, Kontautas asked me if he could leave a tobacco pouch in my apartment for a while. 1 let him do this. When 1 opened the pouch, I saw that there wcre six wedding rings and other things inside. The next day Koniautas picked his pouch up.
24. From Reza Baraheni's Whai Hauuened after the Weddin~?
. :I%@+A &l&j J3 \JdT Works Consulteci
Adorno, Theodore. "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?" Biibure in Moral
and Political Perspective. Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
114-29
"Algerians FLee Growing Wave of Violence." Toronto Star. Aug. 7 1994: E7.
Ambramowicz, Dina. "The Library in the Vilna Ghetto." The Holocaust and the Book:
Destruction and Presewation. Ed. Jonathon Rose. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001. 165-70.
Amnesty International, Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme, Human
Rights Watch, and Reporters sans frontières. Algérie. le livre noir. Paris: Éditions la
Découverte, 1998.
Arad, Yitzhak. Ghetto in Harnes: The Strunele and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the
Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980.
Ashcroft, BU,Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theorv and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
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